You people (as in this HN community) have your conception of middle management taken from memes, comics and to some extent a lack of experience. Managing even 5-10 people means juggling projects, personnel management, being held accountable for all actions of your people, having to be sandwiched between the pie-in-the-sky class and the myopic individual, translator in between. It means jumping on outage calls, doing architecture reviews, and getting slammed with meetings.
Please tell me where these 'managers make a lot of money and do nothing but approve timesheets' companies are, I'd kill to work for one!
I was a technical team lead/line manager and I watched my team casually ask about what I did all day and then 10 minutes later call me up to spend an hour debugging their code for them. And then the next one called me up to work on theirs... :-)
On the other hand I've had managers just the same - cannot understand why anything is difficult and certainly wouldn't waste their time trying to help you.
It's just people, they're sympathetic or not. Determined or not. They care about the outcome for more than themselves or not.
Nobody is blaming the middle or frontline managers here. Those people are driven and genuinely want to do a good job
But what we are saying here is that they are essentially an artificial layer of busywork that adds very little value. This is what decades of empire building and organizational issues have created.
It's slowly changing and people are realizing a lot of the manager work is self-created and sustained.
My prediction is that most tech companies will go through flattening cycles now that we start realizing that adding managers adds a similar amount of busywork.
I was a manager of others who were also called "managers" (they were Project Managers and App Managers) and I was still writing code when needed. These days most managers in IT in my company are non-technical to the point they cannot write a single line of code in any language. Their managers are so non-technical they don't understand SDLC or anything related to what their people are supposed to do. Times changed, what is a manager today changed.
Then why are manager jobs now requiring LeetCode and other technical assessments? It's not easy to get any job anywhere unless you have a technical background.
You're describing frontline management, not middle management. My 2 cents is that frontline management is the worst job in engineering, for the reasons you describe and more.
So I moved from Win 11 to Fedora Workstation some months back. I dual-booted back into Windows once or twice to check something, to upgrade my audio receiver with a serial port, that sort of stuff.
Everyone talks about execs monitoring metrics. What sort of metric would I have registered as? You see a desktop that's on 24/7 suddenly going offline. There's no way these people find out indirectly that I'm now using Linux on the same hardware. What are they going to do, somehow correlate my user agent string when I hit one of their websites or SSO endpoints? I mean, it's possible but I am wondering how much of this topic is wish fulfillment fantasy.
Monthly average user. Uptime for Win 11. Uptime not counting screensaver. Uptime for non-enterprise consumer. If you were a Win 11 enterprise user, then Uptime for enterprise users. Unique hardware indicators - number of distinct PCs in Win 11 ecosystem, separated from new activations. And I'm sure a few others that I haven't thought of.
Declining stats on these measures indicate a problem somewhere in the Win 11 ecosystem. Combine with competitor indicators like sales, and other Win ecosystem OSes.
A single person switching probably doesn't do much to move the indicators. But as a collective?
They'll notice if no Windows machines phone home from your IP address anymore. It doesn't matter so much what you switched to, more that you're no longer giving Microsoft those sweet, sweet KPIs
If a decent number of people migrate away, it would definitely show up in aggregate: Windows Update traffic, for example. Or sales of Windows-specific software/subscriptions. It doesn't require correlated tracking at an individual customer level to see the broader trend.
Losing market share to ChromeOS and Apple has to be the most significant and obvious hit. The Steam Deck and second generation Steam Machines are also likely to nibble away at the edges.
I am not a Mac person, I actually hate a lot of how they operate. Yet, if a tech-illiterate friend were looking for advice, I would likely steer them towards those computer appliances so as to avoid Microsoft's nonsense.
I'm encountering people in their lower 20's who seem to really struggle emotionally, and use psychological lingo to describe themselves and each other in a way that really didn't exist when I was in my 20's.
On the one hand this is great - I am a huge supporter of understanding and accepting ourselves non-pejoratively - anxiety, depression, etc.
On the flip side they talk sometimes like the forces are from outside them, like they have no agency.
And they also talk like the words came from somewhere else, "My generation compared to previous generations..." <- unless you lived those previous generations, which is impossible, you heard that from somewhere, probably a paper, and probably from a professor in school.
Unfortunately the Wall Street accountants who run our companies don't mind if you jump ship after your 2% 'reward' raise. Because when someone new comes and costs 10 % more plus recruiting costs, that latter person has 'proven' their worth in the market, similar to when a house goes up in value due to scarcity.
If you were to explain the costs of knowledge lost, of training, of taking a risk on a new unknown person, of relationships, there's no answer because it doesn't show up in any operating expense worksheet.
What you're supposed to do is find another job, and explain that you love this job so much, but the other offer is really good, can they come up close to it and you'll stay. Repeat this every few years or find a new job and move to it.
Counter-examples are France and Japan. Democracies, electoral terms. High-speed rail that the world looks up to, investment in infrastructure everywhere. In France you have Grand Paris, a programme to transform the suburbs into denser housing and commercial space, a calculation and planning that INCLUDES public transport.
And the green initiatives in France. These, transit, Grand Paris, and much more are initiatives that take many years to realize.
Now let's move over to New Jersey and New York City. The most densely populated state (NJ) has some of the worst transit despite being in the NYC greater metropolitan area. An old tunnel between the two needs to be replaced, but politicians with four year mental horizons canned it until recently (ARC project). Infrastructure is a fight between Federal, two states and a city politically and partially from a funding perspective.
We could go on, but I just wanted to point out that the United States is a poor example of good governance. And that we don't need to live in a totalitarian nightmare just because we acknowledge the US fails to produce innovation and investment for the public good.
And let's not talk about debt, as if it is a unique problem to France or anything new.
Counter-examples are France and Japan. Democracies, electoral terms.
A democracy doesn't prevent long-term planning if only the electorate appreciates long-term projects. Democracies can build stuff across parliaments if differences between parties aren't so overwhelming so as to the majority of them can agree on developing something even if the relative power of elected parties varies over terms.
In a lot of countries the major parties agree on many core views and social code because they share a common nation/society, and the political differences happen merely on the edges or linings of the value spectrum. A government of highly polarised parties voted by a highly heterogeneous pool of voters is not ideal for long-term efforts.
Strong words, but NJ and NY have had Democrats in power continuously for a while. While Christie, a Republican (and a corrupt person) torpedoed the ARC project I mentioned, the other issues seem more related to a lack of centralization.
Something like public transit that powers a region that's a sizable fraction of US GPD should not be a state affair in the first place. What Europeans have that Americans lack are perma-technocrats with a long term vision that are entrenched in power.
You are already paying for other people's healthcare costs, whether it's private or public!
If you pay for home insurance (you kind of have to unless you own your home outright or are renting), you're paying for other people's fire or water damage. And one day they might pay for yours.
If there's a lot of fires or water damage, everyone's costs go up.
It's not a perfect analogy because of factors that affect individual policies, such as the replacement cost of the home, moving next to a fireworks store, moving into a flood zone, etc. You pay more when your home is more at risk.
1. Many landlords don’t require tenant’s insurance.
2. If you choose to get a mortgage you have to pay for homeowner’s insurance yes. You have the option to not get a mortgage if you prefer.
Notice how in both of the above, there is no third party forcing me to pay for anybody’s bad choices.
He’s welcome to pay for home insurance if he likes. That doesn’t mean I’m forced to pay for it. It’s like saying that I’m forced to pay for other people’s education because the Starbucks provides it as a benefit. Not really lol
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