Questionable Advice: "My boss says we don’t need any engineering managers. Is he right?"

Charity Majors · 5 Jan 2024

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Flat, manager-free organisations do not deliver the equality they promise: they get abandoned, and the informal power left behind is unaccountable.

Their wordsOn the other hand, the manager-free experiments I’m aware of (e.g. holacracy at Medium and GitHub, or “Choose Your Own Work” at Linden Lab) have all been quietly abandoned or outgrown.

Also said by Camille Fournier

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Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
Hierarchy is not intrinsically authoritarian: it is a property of self-organising systems that emerges for the benefit of the parts.
Mental modelEmergence

Their wordsBut hierarchy is not intrinsically authoritarian. Hierarchy did not originate as a political structure that humans invented for controlling and dominating one another, it is in fact a property of self-organizing systems, and it emerges for the benefit of the subsystems.
Our reading
If building the organisation is nobody’s first job, it will not get done well.

Their wordsIf you aren’t making building the organization someone’s number one job, it won’t be anyone’s number one job, which means it probably won’t get done very well.
Our reading
Flat, manager-free organisations do not deliver the equality they promise: they get abandoned, and the informal power left behind is unaccountable.

Their wordsOn the other hand, the manager-free experiments I’m aware of (e.g. holacracy at Medium and GitHub, or “Choose Your Own Work” at Linden Lab) have all been quietly abandoned or outgrown.
Our reading
A few larger teams under experienced engineering managers outperform many tiny teams each led by a working tech lead.

Their wordsBut everything I have ever experienced leads me to believe that a fewer number of larger teams, each helmed by an experienced engineering manager, should way outperform this gaggle of tiny groups.
Our reading
What sets a company’s velocity is spending its time on the right things, not how much code it produces.

Their wordsWhat matters is moving the business forward, not churning out code.

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The other pieces are the ones whose claims are worded most like this one's. That measures language, not agreement: they may argue the opposite.