DHH: Un-Manage Your Employees(nfib.com) |
DHH: Un-Manage Your Employees(nfib.com) |
Regarding David's larger point I would add that having a boss tends to make people feel slavish and subservient to a certain extent. This creates an unhealthy work environment compared to the ideal in which all employees are truly on equal footing as regards power. One of the tragedies of working for a manager is that nervous feeling you get when you ponder how much control this one person wields over your career. A superior organizational design is one that takes care to hire people who are great at managing themselves and entrusts them with the power to do so.
> Since large organizations, if they are designed well, are just a latticework of small organizations maybe it's possible there is no upper limit.
How do you make a smaller organization though? By giving someone authority over it who can really take control of it.
> Regarding David's larger point I would add that having a boss tends to make people feel slavish and subservient to a certain extent.
Tough. That's just the way it is. You're always going to have a boss. Whether it's a manager, a C-suite executive, a board of directors, or the customer. You're never going to be completely free from someone having authority over you. It's just a matter of how they use that authority over you.
Now, I will agree that bad bosses (which are unfortunately too common) make you feel slavish. If you have a good boss (and let's give DHH credit, he sounds like he is a good boss), then they make you feel powerful. A boss's primary job is to enable you to do things either with encouragement or by taking care of the administrative details for you. Someone once said that a boss is a "secretary who can fire you."
I can see so many ways that that can go wrong. To me, the reason it works seems more like peer pressure than enjoyment of work.
I love what I do, I love coding, and I also know that I love taking a week out to not care about everything I do at work. If I was in a system like that, I'd feel kinda pressured to keep up with my colleagues and not let the team down. Not by my friends and officemates, but by the knowledge that if I take a week off, that's a week they've got to handle the work I'd do. There's rarely a 'good' time to take holidays, especially in smaller teams.
It could work, it is certainly possible, but it seems an unnecessary area where pressure can occur when a team is under stress. To be honest, I think it could work better with the caveat that everyone has to take a certain minimum level of holiday.
Sick days however make perfect sense.
And if we spot someone burning out because they aren't taking enough vacation or time off, we remind them - and sometimes strongly encourage them - to take some time off.
A final thought: You have to be careful when it comes to embracing the latest business idea. A single anecdote filtered through the eyes of a founder about a new cool philosophy for running a company has to be considered in the light of other evidence, such as the way thousands of other companies are set up and operate.
I sometimes wonder why DHH and Spolsky are so different. DHH speaks as if what he says is law, will work for everyone, Spolsky seems to constantly pad his advice with warnings about context.
> You might be thinking, "This is crazy -- it would never work at my company." And you may be right. But I think there’s a greater chance that it would work. If you’re apprehensive, try experimenting with one team or division.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbars_number
Don't get me wrong, it sounds like a great place to work and an admirable way of managing people.
Is this doomed to fail? what do you guys think?
http://www.xqa.com.ar/visualmanagement/2009/08/scrum-of-scru...
The idea that a middle manager has to be an entity that generates meetings, paperwork, stupid rules and hot air is prevalent, but by no means necessary. Hard to believe, but trust me - the good ones see their role as exactly the reverse.
Most middle managers (and most people in general) are focused on what they need to get done--the reports that need to be filed or the next status meeting to be scheduled. What good managers realize is that their work contributes absolutely nothing to the company (directly.) They are overhead in the purest sense of the word. All those i's to dot and t's to cross don't add a single cent to revenue. The only way they can make any contribution to the company is by making their people more effective. A great manager should be a hacker focused on her people's time rather than on code. She should be anticipating problems and annoyances and dealing with them before they blow up. If there's a fire hose of distractions, she should be the valve that slows the flow down to a trickle and routes the real issues to the appropriate people. Her goal should always be, "How can I make my people 1% more efficient?"
Too bad that most managers appear to be little more than a secretary with a checklist. (Actually, most secretaries I know are more useful than most managers.)
As a counterpoint though, I feel this approach only works with IT, Development and Design Departments. Lot's of other departments (Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Implementation) require a certain structure and hierarchy to function correctly. In my experience, the more specialized the skill set, the more are liberty and culture important to further the drive of the team/teams.
Bonus: you can tell them you're giving them "autonomy", and also fire some managers.
What do you think would happen at Acme Inc., a company with more than 1000 employees, if one division suddenly demoted/relieved the manager, gave each teammate a gratuitous sick/vacation policy, and rotated frontline employees through the management roles?
I work at a company of over 300 employees, where we implement many of these kinds of ideas: we don't count sick or vacation days, our management hierarchy is extremely flat, and we have no policy about what time people come in to work. Despite that, I think this method of management-via-non-management is not something that every company can try on. It has to be built into the culture from day one. DHH is really only describing the trappings of a fun company culture, not the core of it.
You can't take the outward symbols of that culture and pin them on a company which doesn't approach employee trust and management in the same way.
If you want to criticize DHH, be my guest. I might agree with what you're saying. Just don't criticize him and then turn around and do the exact same thing as you accuse him of doing.
I was calling out that he failed to do the latter, and my obligation is to explain why a company might not want to, or be able to, implement those changes.
The fact is that I'm not wrong about him glancing over an important part of his proposal. If you write an article advocating companies undergo radical shifts in their organizational structures, then as someone who is regarded as an informed commenter, you have an obligation to tell people the pitfalls of such a large change. Again, when you don't do that, it's called cheerleading.
He didn't include any discussion of the downsides, or the upsides of hierarchical organization, so I'm not wrong. I should have used a more tactful phrase than "lip-service," however: it's more loaded -- perhaps even derogatory -- than I intended.
My first reaction is that you are very much correct. In fact, it's clear that the article's advice applies moreso to smaller companies than larger. I don't think that anyone would question that it doesn't scale.
> What do you think would happen at Acme Inc., a company with more than 1000 employees, if one division suddenly demoted/relieved the manager, gave each teammate a gratuitous sick/vacation policy, and rotated frontline employees through the management roles?
Divisional consistency is a concern for a large company. However, it is simultaneously possible to maintain a "skunkworks". It comes down to (unsurprisingly) the overall culture / mandate.
Whereas after reading this post (and rereading the last one), it sounds like you might have meant to say "DHH isn't admitting that there might be a downside to his plan. He needs to provide a balanced argument. For example, here's one potential hole that I see" which is a reasonable thing to say. Remember, we humans are dumb animals who are prone to completely misinterpreting your argument. Sometimes you have to beat a dead horse to make your point. :-)