In my 15 years in small and mid-sized tech, I've found the most useless managers are senior managers.
Good team leads and second line managers can make or break an organization. But they are the least respected roles at a company and gets thrown under the bus first. Most companies don't invest anything in training new managers or setting clear roles and responsibilities for managers.
Senior management never faces any accountability but can make big massive changes to an org without consideration for implementation.
Oh, I don't know - in my (admittedly limited and very individual / company-specific) experience, the senior management was hard to relate to from the perspective of us rank and file, but clearly had the Sword of Damocles over their head at all times, and tended to get swept away arbitrarily every few years as the winds of corporate politics changes direction. It seemed to require some exceptional execution (or luck) to defer this cycle for even a year or two.
Depends what you mean by senior management, of course. I'm thinking mostly the "VP / SVP of Engineering" type role, and to a lesser degree, one hop down, the "Senior Director" folks, who seemed to be subject to the same phenomenon but on a slightly slower cycle.
The higher up the rank you go in my company, the more recognizable the faces are from 10,15,even 20 years ago.
Sure, they shuffle the deckchairs, but the turnover and redundancies below them is orders of more chaotic, and I dont understand what it takes to clean house at the senior management level.
My understanding is that all corporate positions above rank and file — and especially the C-levels — live in a meat grinder where the only viabile strat is "figure out how to kill competition on the corporate chaos/ladder before it kills you".
Of course this acts as a filtering mechanism to refine psychopathy and their decision tree about how to treat their labor force, the communities their corporations exist within, their customers, and even their investors reflect how they've treated people to get where they are already: exploit and discard.
Then again, these people always fail upward. They may have the sword hanging over them, but when the sword falls and they leave, they do so with a fist full of millions of dollars in Golden Parachute, and then float over to Level+1 at the next company.
Yeah, over my career I've seen multiple c-suite bounce from company to company getting gently pushed out each time but still collecting massive packages (with the vacation houses and yachts to prove it).
Once you reach a certain level, you get treated with kid gloves. Even with the sword hanging over you, they don't out right fire you, they work out a deal where you "wanted to spend more time with family".
It's because at a certain level you have valuable relationships people want to protect, enough wealth to make decisions without it personally affecting you in a real way (i.e. homelessness, loss of medical care, etc), and information about how the company "really works" that could be valuable to the competition or a tell-all story for the media.
Basically, if you're rich, you're a "real person" and if you're not you're an ant.
Well you don't get to those positions without handling metric buttloads of blackmail, and that's largely all a golden parachute really is: wealthy psychopaths caching out on all of the markers and dirt they have on everyone else when they leave. :P
The most important managers are the ones that serve as an actual translation layer bridging the gap between corporate business speak and developers.
I’m reminded of a recent HN article talking about how bad abstractions are actually just indirection and complicate things whereas good abstractions hide complexity and make things neat and modular
I think this is the article you're refering to [1]. The most frustrating manager I've had felt like they were just a layer of indirection to the rest of the business. Every meeting I was in with them was basically a readout of another meeting. No new insights or synthesis of new information.
I have also had managers who are great at linking the wider strategic goals of the organisation to their team's work. They were rare and worth their weight in gold.
At my most recent jobs, it’s been middle and lower management that was most prone to corporate business speak, and upper management had an incredible and somewhat fearsome ability to cut through bullshit. Depends on who your managers are, what company you’re in, and what department or org your team is part of.
Some recent teams I was on the middle managers spoke clearly and directly, but the frontline managers equivocated, were evasive, or even told lies. TBH I think it was just another case of Peter Principle. The middle managers were good managers who got put in charge of organizations, but they couldn’t train or develop good managers below them.
This is my experience at big tech too. I've had great managers. When I've managed people, they've appeared to genuinely say that I was doing a good job. I've interacted with one Director and one Vice President ever who seemed like they were worth a damn.
I’ve worked at some companies with senior managers that were really good at training other managers and good at fixing problems at a department / org level. Rare, but it happens.
Depends on the problem the group face. Simple problem with known solutions Accountability makes a diff.
But we know there are hard problems, where the group itself doesn't have a solution or agree on the same solution. Keeping groups together is a hard problem.
Good team leads and second line managers can make or break an organization. But they are the least respected roles at a company and gets thrown under the bus first. Most companies don't invest anything in training new managers or setting clear roles and responsibilities for managers.
Senior management never faces any accountability but can make big massive changes to an org without consideration for implementation.