Why managers are useless

`2:23:14`

quite a bit over the years? — I would say, oh yes. And then also, oh no, in the sense that there are absolutely fundamental things both about human nature, about institutions, about programming, about business that I've changed my mind on. And then I've also had experiences that are almost even more interesting where I thought I had changed my mind and I tried it a new way, realized why I had the original opinion in the first place and then gone back to it. So it happens both ways. An example of the later part, for example, was managers at 37signals. For the longest time, I would Rail against engineering managers as an unnecessary burden on a small or even medium sized company. And at one point I actually started doubting myself a little bit. I started thinking like, do you know what? Maybe all programmers do need a one-on-one therapy session every week with their engineering manager to be a whole individual. So we tried that for a couple years where we hired some very good engineering managers

`2:24:15`

who did engineering management the way you're supposed to do it, the way it's done all over the place. And after that I thought like, no, no, I was right. This was correct. We should not have had managers. Not every programmer needs a therapy session with an engineering manager every week. We don't need these and least scheduled huddles. We don't need all these meetings. We just need to leave people the hell alone to work on problems that they enjoy for long stretches of uninterrupted time. That is where happiness is found. That's where productivity is found. And if you can get away with it, you absolutely should. Engineering management is a necessary evil when that breaks down. — What's the case for managers then? — The case for managers is that if you do have a lot of people. There's a bunch of work that kind of just crops up. The one-on-one is one example that programmers need someone to check in with. There's another idealized version that someone needs to guide the career of juniors, for example, to give them redirecting feedback and all this other stuff. And it's not that in the abstract,

`2:25:18`

I don't agree with some of those things, but in practice I've found that they often create more problems that they solve. And a good example here is can you get feedback from someone who's not better at your job than you are? You get some feedback. You can get feedback on how you show up at work. Are you being courteous to others? Are you being a good communicator? Okay, yes. But you can't get feedback on your work and that's more important. It's more important that you work under and with someone who's better at your job than you are if you wish to progress in your career. And every single programmer I've ever worked with was far more interested in progressing in their career on that metric, getting better at their craft than they were in picking up pointers that a middle manager could teach them. That's not saying that there isn't value in it. It's not saying there isn't value in being a better person or a better communicator. Of course there is all those things. But if I have to choose one or the other, I value competence higher. Like that's again, I caveat this a million times

`2:26:19`

because I know what people sometimes hear. They hear the genius asshole is just fine and that's great and you should excuse all sorts of malicious behavior if someone's just really good at what they do. I'm not saying that at all. What I am saying is that the history of competence is a history of learning from people who are better than you, and that relationship should take precedence over all else and that relationship gets put aside a bit when engineering managers introduced. Now the funny thing is this conversation ties back to the earlier things we were talking about. Most engineering managers are actually former programmers. They at least no program to some extent, but what I've seen time and again is that they lose their touch, their feel with it very, very quickly and turn into pointy haired bosses very, very quickly who are really good at checking for updates. Just seeing where we are on project A here if you need anything or we ready to deliver. Okay, yes. And also, no. Shut up, leave me the hell alone.

`2:27:20`

Let me program and then I'll come up for error. I'll talk with other programmers who I can spar with that we can learn something with. I can turn the problems over with and we can move forward. If you look back on the history of computer industry, all the great innovation that's happened, it's all been done by tiny teams with no engineering managers. Just full of highly skilled individuals. You've had John Carmack on here. I used to look up to its software so much. Not just because I loved quick, not just because I loved what they were doing, but because he shared a bit about how the company worked. There were no managers or maybe they had one business guy doing some business stuff, but that was just to get paid. Everything else was basically just designers and programmers. And there were about eight of them and they created goddamn "Quake II." So why do you need all these people again? Why do you need all these managers again? I think, again, at a certain scale it does break down. It's hard to just have a hundred thousand programmers running around wild without any product mommies or daddies telling them what to do.

`2:28:23`

I understand that. And then even as I say that, I also don't understand it. Yeah, because if you look at something like Gmail, for example, there was like a side project done by Buchheit at Google at the time. So much of the enduring long-term value of even all these huge companies were created by people who didn't have a manager. And that's not an accident, that's a direct cause and effect. So I've turned in some way even more militant over the years against this notion of management, at least for myself and knowing who I am and how I wanna work. Because the other part of this is I don't want to be a manager, and maybe this is just me projecting the fact that I'm an introvert who don't like to talk to people on one-on-one calls every week. But it also encapsulates how I was able to progress my career. I did not really go to the next level with Ruby or otherwise until I had a door I could close and no one could bother me for six hours straight. — So in companies probably one of the reasons is it's very easy to hire managers, and managers also delegate responsibility from you.

`2:29:27`

So if you just have a bunch of programmers running around, you're kind of response like it's work, it's intellectual work to have to deal with the the first principles of every problem that's going on. So managers like you can like relax, oh I'll be taken care of. But they then hire their own managers and it just multiplies and multiplies and multiplies. I would love it if some of the great companies would have in the United States, if there was like an extra side branch that we could always run, maybe physicists can come up how to split the simulation to where just all the managers are removed. Also just in that branch, just the PR and the comms people also. And even the lawyers, just the engineers and let's just see and then we merge it back. — I've essentially run that branch at 37signals for 20 years. And I've experimented with forking back on the other side. I've experimented with having a full-time lawyer on staff. I've experimented with having engineering managers. And I can tell you life is much better

`2:30:30`

at 50, 60 people when none of those individuals or none of those roles. It's never about the individuals. It's about the roles. None of those roles are in your organization fulltime. Occasionally you need a manager. Occasionally you need a lawyer. I can play the role of manager occasionally, fine. And then I can set it back down to zero. It's almost like a cloud surface. I wanna a manager service I can call on for seven hours this week and then I wanna take it down to zero for the next three months. — Yeah. I read. I don't know if this is still the case, that Basecamp is an LLC and doesn't have a CFO, like a full-time accountant. Was that upgrade? — So the funniest. These days, we do have a head of finance. We did not for the first 19 years of life, I think. We got away with basically just an accountant do our books in the same way you would do a small ice cream shop, except we would over time have done hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. The scale seemed quirky. And at some point, you can also fall in love

`2:31:31`

with your own quirkiness to a degree that isn't actually healthy. And I've certainly done that over time and we should have had someone mount or count the beans a little more diligently, a little earlier. This was part of a blessing of just being wildly profitable and selling software that can have infinite margins basically that you kind of can get away with a bunch of stuff that you perhaps shouldn't. What partially taught me this lesson was when we realized we had not been collecting sales tax in different US states where we had Nexus. And it took us about two years and $5 million in settlements and cleanups to get out of that mess. And after that I went like, okay, fine, we can hire a finance person. And we now have a wonderful finance person, Ron, who actually ended up replacing something else. We used to have a full-time data analytics person who would do all sorts of insight mining for why are people signing up for this thing. We ran that for 10 years and realized, you know what? If I can have either a data analytics person or an accountant, I'm picking the accountant. — I love this so much on so many levels.