The Ask
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Discussion (48 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
For line managers, they are deluged with impossible, specific asks and they have no real way of knowing if the team will be able to perform, or be happy to. They survive by maintaining fictions and blinders, and staying just ahead in chips.
I think he's underselling to say it's instinct; in law it's called ripeness, waiting for when something really needs to be addressed, and then ideally just reflect that in a way people can take on instead of taking control. The senior's job is not to intervene unless necessary, and even then to prefer activating others.
So I feel it's a project manager mindset to always be tallying asks; while a senior manager is really tracking issues and capabilities on a different timescale, doing the prep to build the capability to address the issue when it's ripe.
It's a good exercise to mentally go around the a meeting room and think about what each person wants from it. Given Rands' job, he obviously starts thinking about it earlier, and for longer, but even a few minutes while everyone's settling in and chit-chatting can make a difference in how you participate.
I take this as generally focusing on the what ask (and hence give) becomes. But it reminds me of the business classic Theory of Constraints. To me the laserlike focus, or attempt to get to singular clarity is the point; in this highlight we're seeing the notion of software skills rather then a data-based approach, as it's a soft problem.
Both matter. I appreciate this reminder.
But I also found the article really unsatisfying. The idea that middle management should spend enormous amounts of time building relationships because other middle managers got vibes that one day it might be useful is insane. I think the article represents the worst of big, slow tech bureaucracies.
Replacing middle management with AI would not work, but using AI to avoid managers needing to have all these meetings would probably work really well. The idea that there's some AI system that has access to all the documents/email/task management systems at the company is a good one, and it could identify situations (like the one in the article) where two projects on opposite ends of the organization are colliding.
Instead of two middle managers needing to do 1:1s with no clear need for years because other middle managers got vibes that they should could be replaced by an AI system that uncovered situations like the ones mentioned in the article.
This wouldnt replace middle managers, but it might help them do their jobs better.
LLMs are inherently gullible.
We're not going to call it "management" necessarily, but there is no question that LLMs are going to take over decision making from managers eventually. Why choose a monkey guessing what the evidence says you should do when you could have an optimised evidence-weighted statistical model making the bets? The only reason to use humans is there are still technical limits on how general the models are, limits that seem to be falling away at a pleasing rate.
Isn't such a model inevitably going to be lagging what is happening?
(Monkeys can see/smell/recognise the scat or track of a large cat very quickly and don't sit around to check the data)
People, especially in remote jobs, benefit from being organized into groups intentionally, with distinct rituals that enable them to operate effectively while they get to know each other better. Another person needs to design and oversee all that.
While you can provide templates for that structure that allow oversight to scale so that one person can oversee larger groups, that tends to be more effective in non-remote, and more predictable, work environments. Modern software development is very little of that.
I don't have much in-person experience with middle management in contexts outside of software development, and I suspect there are some opportunities to use AI to bring engineers closer to customers.
* You're an engineer with 3-6 years of experience in a primarily IC role
* Maybe you've done some tech lead stuff, but you've never actively worked in engineering management.
* You feel that management (and HR for some reason?) is constantly in the way of you getting stuff done, and that your life would be easier if you could simply decline every meeting and only communicate through pull requests.
Humor me, please. I'll explain after.
By extension we're going to need a lot less middle managers as coordination problems decrease.
As for the point I think you're trying to make, the problem with middle management and other chokepoints in general (like PM teams) is that often they become an antipattern. They soak in all the information and then dole it out parsimoniously, so the typical experience as an IC is to be barely able to see the full picture
I had a 50/50 chance of guessing which side of the bell curve you were on and I was wrong. :)
The right work just doesn't get done without staff engineers and architect types having frequent conversations & meetings as well as constant code reviewing. Or long-term ICs effectively doing this role without the title and expectations/responsibilities (raises hand). You can identify these people because they ask questions relentlessly. Always well-considered ones, but even the ones that might make them look stupid in a meeting.
Coding is a small percentage of the work but also just as important. That's the sweet spot. The "non-stop meetings/socializing" people and the "headphones on & grind PRs" types are both two extremes of behavior that are boat-anchors in any organization and will bring productivity/customer-impact to a screeching halt if it goes unchecked for long enough.
And it's _always_ those stupid-seeming questions that uncover showstopping problems that would have bit you if left ignored.
Edit: Not to greenlight anything Palantir is doing, but in my opinion the FDE/FDSE model is probably everyone's near-future if your company is B2B. You can't be an "ignore meetings" type of person and do that.
Sometimes we do stuff well because we like the other monkey we're doing it with. Sometimes we do stuff badly because we are an angry monkey. Sometimes we do the right thing but we cannot really explain why. We can sort of predict what the future will be like but not really well.
Management is pretending to "execute programs" and "align value chains" and "strategize on market trends" because the suits they wear are very expensive. But the reality is that they are also monkeys, who try to manage the emotions and urges and pitfalls of other monkeys by guiding interactions between the monkeys.
This kind of slightly wooly, slightly look-at-me-being-business-y kind of writing feels to me like selling your "I'm a monkey who can sometimes make other monkeys interact more effectively" as some cold hard logical skill.
Not "Ask". "Ask" is a verb.
but in this case, specifically. who are these career people thinking about orgs and their movement in years?
especially in a job economy where employees are expected to be laid off despite "staggering profits". It feels completely orthogonal to the environment I exist in.
is there room for lifers in big orgs? without getting the boot or worrying about the boot?
I would like to move on but also given the current climate that seems ludicrous.
People I talk to in similar places are in the same boat. Hiring is frozen, there's not enough people to manage everything we have, and everyone remaining is hanging on for dear life.