Why managers are useless

`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.