Confronting Managerialism

What Hacker News says

1. wpietriSep 2024
   That makes a lot of sense to me. I certainly have opinions on what it's like when people without software experience try to manage software projects. And the better I get about making software, the more respect I have for other people's crafts.

   And I think I'd add to that the concept of "business class", the notion that executives are a special caste who deserve to rule over the lessers. Who not only can but should treat with contempt the people who do the work, who hold the knowledge.

   There's another related component to me, what Mary Poppendieck called "The Tyrrany of The Plan". There's a notion that if you have a sufficiently good plan, anybody can execute it and you should get a perfect result. The extent to which that almost never works rarely diminishes faith in the creed. My long experience is that for anything worthwhile, a plan only takes you so far; you need expertise to adapt to changing circumstances, to learn along the way. But belief in The Plan fits in well with a managerial upper caste, because it lets them take credit for the successes and blame others for the failures.

   If you haven't read it, you might enjoy Locke and Spender's "Confronting Managerialism".

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2. wpietriDec 2022
   And I think #2 and #3 is why #1 is true. Or put differently, my experience in changing processes in many places has convinced me that unspoken management dynamics are what really matter, and that most managers will resent any process change that makes the actual management dynamics obvious.

   For example, one way to classify process changes is when they make problems obvious. E.g., a release-early, release-often approach makes problems visible early on. And I've had great luck with them on teams that are actually trying to succeed, because faster feedback means faster learning. But most organizations reject that because actual success doesn't matter nearly as much as managerial appearance of success. Many managers thus hate fast-feedback processes because they would rather hide negative information, even if that makes long-term success much less likely. But they like the appearance of success that comes with using the latest buzzwords. This results in the common pattern of the manager who talks Agile but whose projects are in effect waterfall.

   One book really helpful to me here looks at the default ideology of current management: https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-Ec...

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3. wpietriDec 2022
   > You’d think if the future depended on it, build times could be reduced.

   Possibly not! We have gotten worse at building large things. One interesting explanation comes via Poppendieck's "Tyrrany of the Plan": https://chrisgagne.com/1255/mary-poppendiecks-the-tyranny-of...

   Her prime example here is the Empire State Building, which was built on time and on budget even though they had not finished designing it when they started building. The basic notion is that contrary to the current paradigm, more planning does not necessarily make things better.

   On my own account I'd add that the rise of The Plan corresponds to a rise in a managerial caste (driven in part by the invention and rise of MBAs) that took power from people with domain-specific expertise. Much of that managerial work relates to developing, maintaining, and enforcing The Plan. But this is so much the dominant paradigm that it's hard for many to even imagine alternatives. A good book here is Spender & Locke's "Confronting Managerialism": https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-Ec...

   So it may be that even if the future depended on it, build times could not be reduced because it's paradigmatically impossible. For basically the same reason that a lot of large software projects are clusterfucks: the POSIWID-type purpose of many organizations is not the work they're supposed to be doing, but protecting and benefiting the people supervising the work.

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4. wpietriDec 2021
   Only to the extent that a) there is direct competition sufficient for this to make a difference, and b) bad management isn't an endemic problem across wide swathes of American business. But there are widespread concerns about declining competition. [1] And some, me included, see American business culture as captured by managerialism. [2]

   By your theory, all companies should be pretty efficient and managers pretty effective. But how many people would say that about their companies? If that's how most of your friends talk about their bosses, let me know where they live and I'll move there.

   One good example to look at here is the notion of bullshit jobs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

   [1] E.g.: https://hbr.org/2018/03/is-lack-of-competition-strangling-th...

   [2] This is a good book on the topic: https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-Ec...

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5. wpietriSep 2021
   I'd suggest you read about managerialism, our reigning business paradigm. Spender and Locke's "Confronting Managerialism" really opened my eyes. If you think of management's purpose as making the business better, there's a lot that doesn't make sense. But it gets clearer if you think of it as caste dedicated to both individual and class power and enrichment, who also try to keep the business on the rails enough that there's something to have power over and extract money from.

   Not that all managers are bad or anything; plenty of them are people just trying to get things done. It's a structural problem.

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6. wpietriAug 2021
   Exactly. And if you're curious what this says, I'd recommend reading Spender and Locke's "Confronting Managerialism". It's a great look at the dominant ideology of MBA-style management. And for me Rother's "Toyota Kata" was a good inspiration as to how to think of management not as control layer, but where teaching and support are the most important functions.
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