But my cynical worker viewpoint is that the problem is really that upper management doesn't do the actual work and that is by design. It's a class separation. They are there to crack the whip and collect the spoils.
The only way for upper management to really understand what's going on and give useful input would be for them to be directly involved on a day-to-day basis.
In other words, they would have to do actual work.
That's not going to happen. So the best they can do is to stay out of the way of people who are actually working, avoid making decrees, and maybe try to keep the other managers from interfering with the work also.
Maybe another approach would be for the workers to share more equally in the spoils so that they would be naturally inclined to integrate business improvements and goals. But that's never going to happen.
The structure is much more directly related to a caste system than people may acknowledge.
You get to a point where it's impossible to do the work anymore. There's too much of it. You have to develop teams, processes, structure, etc. that delivers the outcomes you're accountable for with full knowledge that you cannot do them yourself. It's very different than doing the work and experience shows that fewer people are capable of doing it, especially with any repeatability. The working world yearns for effective managers.
I encourage you to compare the productivity of the modern multinational corporation to any commune in history. The people working in collectives are not stupid or lazy. It's not an effective structure.
It’s a hard comparison to make when the goals of those two systems are vastly different.
I worked for a multinational software company and the amount of waste I saw was just staggering. If outside shareholders knew how little we actually produced on a day to day basis, they would probably be appalled. But because the company knew how to engage with market analysts, we looked good on paper. So much of the money made today involves just being the biggest player in a given market, regardless of how effective the product is (i.e. “nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft”)
This is historically correct
Here's a recent unambiguous proof from Tesla's own words:
"Tesla argued that stock options were used to ensure Director's incentives were aligned with investor goals." [1]
Said another way, "we massively over-paid directors in order to give them an incentive to prioritize investor goals over all other goals"
In the parlance of finance this is the only goal and the ultimate decision that cannot be questioned.
I have seen this made explicit in multiple organizations as a Director or Senior Manager. As a manager, if you are explicit in supporting employee benefits over increase in stock price or C-Suite direction (when given the choice) then you should expect no further growth or promotions (unless you can manipulate the org or have some damaging information on the company).
>Maybe another approach would be for the workers to share more equally in the spoils so that they would be naturally inclined to integrate business improvements and goals
The strong form of this is a worker-owned-cooperative but second to that are labor unions. So if you want to change it, then start/join a union and stop creating corporations with separate ownership rules for investors.
[1]https://www.engadget.com/tesla-directors-agree-to-return-735...
The worst system was a DOS-based point-of-sale system in a restaurant---kept around way beyond the 'age of DOS'. The main gimmick is that it had a wired light touch pen (I think it worked like a classic Nintendo gun) for selection. It gave the illusion of innovation/ease of use, but was extremely cumbersome and required a good amount of experience to avoid mistakes.
I also think trying to pin down things as strictly class warfare every time can muddy problem areas. Institutions realistically do gain some functional productivity by having people specialize and having defined roles, but having them too separated and specialized can also create problems. You can also have a lazy human problem, where people don't want to do the work that isn't directly associated with their role, and so on. There is also a lot in the bschool lit about how different business structures contribute to these problems too.
Sure there are managers that crack the whip, but most the places I’ve worked for, my manager was a former IC and cared deeply about the health of the product, while protecting the IC team I was on from the business side.
Learning more about the business portion and product manager viewpoints, gives me a more sympathetic tone to the whole situation.
We shouldn’t expect someone whose career they’ve focused on the business side to understand the software in depth. Sure there’s space to learn anything, but people have lives outside of career. Instead, a healthy company delegates these tasks out. It’s the responsibility of my manager to have one foot in the software, and one in the business, to help best translate and champion towards a common goal.
It’s the responsibility of her managers to respect the decisions she makes, and when hard lines are drawn for the sake of the health of the product to adhere to them. Within reason, of course.
This to me makes me feel excited to go to work (not every day, I’m not a psycho :) ), and makes me want to climb the ladder. I get paid well, produce value for the company, and get opportunities to work on challenges and with data/systems that I otherwise would not be able to.
With that knowledge, I can then take that to my side business and more effectively grow it. Don’t think there’s any “they’re taking the spoils” going on…
I think that's what good managers are supposed to do. As in, that's their entire job.
Managers are not necessarily good at doing the actual work, but hopefully, the people they manage are. The thing is: running a business involves a lot more than doing the "actual work", coordination, dealing with customers, etc... Managers are supposed to shield workers from all that, so that they can concentrate on the "actual work".
For example, a somewhat idealized but not so far from the truth exchange with my manager could look like:
- The customers is unhappy with the latest release, he says that X doesn't work as expected, can you tell me why?
- Uhm... X wasn't in the specs so it wasn't tested, but sure, it is a bug
- Ok, how long you think it will it take to fix it?
- Probably around two days
- Ok, let's make it 4 to account for risk and management. It shouldn't cause major delays but I may need to find some extra budget, I will negotiate with the customer since it wasn't originally planned. In the meantime, work on fixing that bug and tell me how it goes.
I've been thinking about my role as a technical writer (TW) recently. I think TWs have a lot of opportunity to operate in a similar way. The real name of the game for my line of work is organizational knowledge management. For example, I've had some [1] success getting Eng teams to dump common Q&A into Stack Overflow so that the next time the issue comes up they can just link customers to that answer. It often feels a bit more lightweight and less intimidating than updating the official docs. Also the Q and A nature of Stack Overflow keeps the docs request tightly scoped. And of course the end result is that the knowledge is much more accessible.
On the other hand, maybe there's nothing special about SREs or TWs here and "organizational knowledge management" is the name of the game for every role in the org. We all just tackle the problem from a different angle.
[1] Emphasis on "some" here. Sometimes it works very well, other times it doesn't go anywhere.
reader-mode (if available) is often the best workaround to enable copy
"Uuuh nothing, only that they are an impending thing in software :sweat-smile:"
