[throwaway746262]

If you fired all the people that build things, then your company could no longer build things. If you fire all the people that sell things, then your company could no longer sell things. Grug brain understand this.

But if you fired all the managers then... What? Wouldn't everything just continue as before? Grug brain has never understood management.

[majewsky]

Then no high-level decisions would get made. Any technical argument that spans beyond one person would be at risk of running into an eternal stalemate. No strategic choices would be undertaken.

(Tone indicator: Not a value judgment. I'm not saying that all managers are particularly good at this, same as how observing that "builders build things" does not mean that the builders are necessarily good at building.)

[throwaway746262]

I feel like "making choices" and "making decisions" isn't really a full time job. Maybe just see what a group of seniorish people think?

I don't sort of "hate managers" or anything. Just curious about why businesses always seem to think they have to have them.

[Jemaclus]

I think you should ask yourself that last question again, and this time really think about it. Why /do/ all companies seem to have managers?

(Tone clarification: I'm not approaching this in a condescending manner, but more of a "let's talk through this problem out loud and see where it gets us." So please don't take this as condescension.)

One way to think about "obvious" solutions to problems, such as a "no manager" solutuon, is this: if it's so obvious, why is no one doing it? For example, I worked for a grocery delivery startup for a while. Every single new hire, without fail, would show up at the end of the first week and say "I have a great idea, why don't we let users shop by recipe?"

On its face, it sounds like a brilliant idea! One intuition-based shortcut to find the answer is: if that's such an obvious thing, why doesn't Amazon or Kroger or Safeway or HEB or any of the major grocery chains let you do that?

And of course, the answer is: that's not how users shop. If it worked, the big players would be doing it. They're not. Are you smarter than Amazon? Probably not. That's not to say a smaller group can't innovate past Amazon, but Amazon has some /really fucking smart people/ working for them, and the odds are fantastically small that you'll out-think them. (You can certainly out-_pivot_ them by doing something faster than they can, but if it turns out to be valuable, in the long run, they'll do it too.)

So when you approach a conversation like this and say, "Maybe just see what a group of seniorish people think?", one way to do a quick sanity check on it is: can you think of successful companies that are run that way?

You probably can't. I certainly can't.

There's a similar problem in the theatre world. It is universally understood that someone doing a 60 second monologue for an audition is _the worst way to evaluate theatrical performance_... except for everything else.

And similarly, it appears, based on scanning the successful companies, that having managers is possibly also the worst way to ensure performance... except for everything else.

So... managers it is. It's unlikely that there's a better way to do this at scale. Many people have tried. Management chains always win.

[taormina]

I agree with your broader consensus, but, for that example you give, HEB absolutely lets you shop by recipe on their website.

[Jemaclus]

But the larger point is still true: For every "why don't they just do X? It's so obvious!" you can look around and note that [almost] /nobody/ is doing that, and that should be a pretty big signal about the idea.

My original post is about the intuition behind how to approach questions like that. Whenever anyone says "Why don't they just do $OBVIOUS_THING?" the answer is "because nobody is doing it."

Now, with respect to that particular feature, I can provide some personal experience to explain /why/ [almost] nobody has that feature. As a disclaimer, I don't know HEB's website. They were just someone we dealt with, and I don't live in their service area, so it's interesting that they have the feature.

What I can tell you from experience is that it would not be a significant driver of revenue, certainly not enough to be a majorly supported feature by a major company that has other value props out there. By far the biggest revenue driver for a grocery company are the staples that people buy every single week: the same milk, the same bread, the same cereal, the same ground beef, the same mac 'n cheese.

People, as a general population, are not adventurous at home When you want something new and interesting, you go out to a restaurant. When you want something familiar and comfortable and, most importantly, easy, you make it at home. I would hazard that the number of times that the average American family of four would cook a brand new recipe they've never had before is probably less than a dozen times /per year/.

So if you're a company that gets >90% of its revenue from weekly recurring users and staples, and <1% of its revenue from recipe-driven results, and you have limited resources, which of those do you think you should focus on? Obviously, you focus on the former. A 10% increase in staples sales is worth millions and millions of dollars, whereas a 10% increase in recipe sales is worth, maybe, a few hundred thousand dollars. It's not nothing, but it's not really worth it from an ROI perspective. Maybe if it's a set-it-and-forget-it kind of feature, it might work?

But over the long run you'll have to come back and upgrade dependencies and migrate to the newest framework du jour, and blah blah blah, and the next thing you know you have a team of four full-time engineers working on a feature that brings in half their salary.

HEB doing it is, well, it's interesting. I am supremely confident it is not a significant revenue driver. It might be something that increases NPS scores or something to that effect, but it's not going to move the needle on revenue very much. So it's interesting that they have the feature.

So if you take all of that into account -- you'll just have to trust me that I know what I'm talking about, I'm sorry about that -- then you can see that someone saying "What if we just got senior people in a room to see what they think?" is a question that doesn't deserve much attention. Not because it's a dumb idea, but because it's actually an interesting idea that has no merits when you dig down and look at it.

If it worked, as the intuition goes, the industry at-large would be doing it. And the evidence bears that out.

[throwaway746262]

Yes, I take your point.

But if I said "I don't understand the point of brakes. Why do all cars get made with brakes?", then as well as making your point ("look, do you really think you know better than Stellantis!?") there's also a straightforward answer which is "cars need brakes so they can stop instead of killing people."

What's the "straightforward answer" case for the existence of managers? Your answer just suggests that such an answer does exist, without revealing what it is.

[Jemaclus]

Sort of in the same vein as "you don't need to understand gravity to recognize that it's important," you not understanding what the answer is doesn't mean there isn't an answer and that the answer isn't important.

I don't have "the answer" (I have _an_ answer, see below), and I also don't need to know "the answer" in order to understand that the managerial class doesn't exist for shits and giggles. There's value there.

If Bezos thought getting rid of managers at Amazon would make him another half a billion dollars, you bet your ass he'd do it.

My answer? It's exactly what that group of seniorish people would do: make decisions. But the seniorish people can't make decisions all day and ALSO do the things they're senior at. You may not like that answer -- and you don't have to! -- but "making decisions" is something that needs to get done at scale without sacrificing the actual productive work that ICs do.

But again, I think you're asking a great question, and I think there's room to say "Is the current paradigm the best paradigm?" and explore other alternatives.

But the very clear answer from all research in addition to basic intuition is "As far as we know, yes."

Why? Doesn't really matter. We just know that if we didn't have managers, the world as we know it wouldn't exist. (For better or for worse!)

[taormina]

The people who decide that managers are mandatory, are, the managers.