Explaining tech's notion of talent scarcity (opens in new tab)

One bit of corpo-speak that I have seen cropping up to address this is relabeling "managed by" as "supported by", as in, "team X will be supported by person Y." It may not work overnight, but I would like to see a shift in the culture of a manager "managing" like a king manages his kingdom and the peasants within, to "supporting", like a coordinator. But I fear that we will fall back to the ape mentality of hierarchies and end up twisting the words to fit our predetermined outcomes.

There are a lot of other factors at play:

A lot of less experienced employees don’t understand what managers do. There is also a certain personality I’d call “the geeky engineer” who thinks the same way.

Some things that are actually signs of an effective manager are hated by employees. Some individual employees for example need micromanagement or frequent manager involvement to make sure they don’t go off track, get stuck without telling anybody, or blow a time budget on something unimportant (eg a task is scoped at 2 weeks and they spend the entire first week playing with something speculative that may help).

A lot of managers are both highly paid and truly bad. I think a lot of businesses don’t do as good of a job vetting EM hires as they do SWEs the EM will manage. And I don’t mean that the EM needs to be Staff-level necessarily.

Even a good manager is incentivized to do things that are globally suboptimal (empire building, overextending) for career growth. This is also true of ICs though.

Personally, I think the biggest problem is the EM hiring bar though. Where I work has high standards and is very selective when recruiting ICs, but it seems like all that goes out the window for external EMs. I do think EMs deserve high pay and to be incentivized to do good work, but that requires a hiring process that better distinguishes between good and bad EMs.

The problem, IMO, is the muddying of the managerial role, such that they now do 2 separate roles, one of which is overpaid, the other not. The computer all but killed the secretary, and the remaining (computer-assisted) secretarial duties got split between the ICs and management. Because you can only dump so much secretarial work onto your ICs before they stop being able to produce anything, the managerial level got a bulk of the secretarial work, which in turn prompted more hiring at the managerial level. On top of that, it represented a flip-flop in power dichotomy, because the managers still have their managerial duties/powers: the people doing a lot of the secretarial work now have the power to fire the people doing the product work. Combined with people's self-interest in protecting and building their own positions, this leads to secretarial work bloat, and thus even more managerial bloat, and an increase in secretarial workload on the ICs.

My pitch for a the ideal corporate structure: bring back the secretaries. Re-introduce the division between your secretarial work and your managerial work, and shrink the number of managers by a significant fraction. Ideally, the result is A) fewer managers means more budget for hiring better mangers B) less secretarial work among your ICs and managers boosting both productivity and job satisfaction C) flatter management hierarchy means less information loss between ICs and the top decision makers and D) the people doing secretarial work no longer have the power to shunt that work off onto the ICs.

> 1) Poor management (broadly defined) creates misaligned incentives, busy work, etc. that "gets in the way" of good talent executing well.

> 2) Management, who "doesn't really do anything," is overpaid relative to the IC's who "Do the work."

> These two ideas, though, are in contradiction

I don't see them in contradiction. They're also neither mutually inclusive nor mutually exclusive. They are separate observations and both may be valid or invalid for a given set of management.

I happen to think that there's a lot of good "management" but not a lot of good executive teams. Sure there's definitely a lot of bad management too, but IMO there's a far bigger pie taken from poor (or outright employee-hostile) C- or S-level executives.

I said that there is no "talent scarcity" and anyone claiming that there is can count themselves among the rank of bad management. If management can't attract and retain talent, it's by definition bad management.

I think the only solution is more managers to manage the existing managers

What about 0 and negatively contributing?