Like other comments there seems to be an implied “managers as superman” here- and it’s not a surprise - perhaps the last fifty or hundred years have mixed “aristocracy”, “elite”, and “white collar management”. It’s hard for even trades Union fish to see water.
Anyway, I think we are seeing a rethinking of what management is - and that will have implications for elite / aristocracy as well. There will be a fight.
My two cents are that the “workers” for many industries are moving from human beings to CPUs. There are amazing photos of rooms of “accountants” simply adding numbers on adding machines which are passed up the line till the corporation gets a final number. Each of those got replaced with whatever IBM made in 1956 (besides Fortran). The manager of that room of humans suddenly stopped worrying about Bob’s attitude and had to worry about silicon.
Something less obvious and photogenic has been happening for years.
Coders in short are the new managers (supervisors)
But we have three other jobs of “management”
- technical lead : understands the details of his area deeply and can make trade offs and build a better engineered product (ie door plugs that don’t fall out)
Product management- honestly I remain dubious about this as a category - with good user communication a tech lead can do most of this, until we shade into strongly fashion / FMCG
- organisational manager - someone looking at the needs of the org - how will this affect the nebulous idea of the company. This is the point at which politics takes over - this level of management is primarily running budgets 100x their own salary and so can be seen more as financier or VC than part of the company. However this is how for example the Post Office justifies jailing it’s own employees
I am wandering off the point a bit - paint fumes I suspect, but there is one final point to make - management differs above from working in the company - on day to day operations - and working on changing the company - new projects and initiatives. Theoretically the cut off is supervisory (ie. Coders are new managers)
But that’s never true - most innovation bubbles up and is then selected in a competition by various hierarchies
I think the point I am making is that we do not need superman as manager - we need properly aligned systems and incentives, which I suspect only happens in open daylight
Peter Drucker proposes this (that as more is automated, more people end up as effective managers) in "The Effective Executive" over fifty years ago.
But I have a blog I'm half in the middle of that dives deeper here. The manager is less "superman" and more a collection of part time jobs, one of which is to be contextual hubs for the organization. Within most IT organizations, it is their job to gather information from across and outside the organization. That isn't as much a "superhuman" job as much as a role that takes a job.
The real problem is that we tied "people management" to this job. I don't think that's a necessary feature but rather a historical coincidence.
Hmmm, please point us to the blog post when it’s out - sounds good.
I think you are pointing at a disaggregation of the manager role - and I agree
My take on the various roles is
- (Model, Monitor, Mentor)
- resource allocation
- hierarchical politics (ensuring the continued existence of the hierarchy and shifting currents within that hierarchy for rights to resource allocation. Certainly not significant rethinking of hierarchy)
The first two are replaceable by software, resource allocation and hire by politics are replaceable by democracy.
The combination of software and democracy in our organisations threatens everything
Anyway, I think we are seeing a rethinking of what management is - and that will have implications for elite / aristocracy as well. There will be a fight.
My two cents are that the “workers” for many industries are moving from human beings to CPUs. There are amazing photos of rooms of “accountants” simply adding numbers on adding machines which are passed up the line till the corporation gets a final number. Each of those got replaced with whatever IBM made in 1956 (besides Fortran). The manager of that room of humans suddenly stopped worrying about Bob’s attitude and had to worry about silicon.
Something less obvious and photogenic has been happening for years.
Coders in short are the new managers (supervisors)
But we have three other jobs of “management”
- technical lead : understands the details of his area deeply and can make trade offs and build a better engineered product (ie door plugs that don’t fall out)
Product management- honestly I remain dubious about this as a category - with good user communication a tech lead can do most of this, until we shade into strongly fashion / FMCG
- organisational manager - someone looking at the needs of the org - how will this affect the nebulous idea of the company. This is the point at which politics takes over - this level of management is primarily running budgets 100x their own salary and so can be seen more as financier or VC than part of the company. However this is how for example the Post Office justifies jailing it’s own employees
I am wandering off the point a bit - paint fumes I suspect, but there is one final point to make - management differs above from working in the company - on day to day operations - and working on changing the company - new projects and initiatives. Theoretically the cut off is supervisory (ie. Coders are new managers)
But that’s never true - most innovation bubbles up and is then selected in a competition by various hierarchies
I think the point I am making is that we do not need superman as manager - we need properly aligned systems and incentives, which I suspect only happens in open daylight