In my experience, what does a manager do if there's no one around to manage?
And how do employees get recognized for their contributions if there are no managers to track it?
It's a catch-22. My thought is that if companies simply paid people as much as they could, all of this would go away. You wouldn't even _need_ managers anymore. One of managers' more important roles, liaising between departments, could become their full time job, which would be better for everyone too (less overhead with employee reviews and bullshit like that).
How does this work? Rather than a company asking an employee what their salary range is, the employee asks the company what is the most they can afford to pay you, and they pay you that.
Forgetting the other most important role, coaching people on the team. And yet another one, shelter from outside unrest. Oh, and blame-absorber. And coordinating efforts, when yet again three engineers in three different places work on the same issue.
You know, this is starting to resemble the "what have the romans ever done for us" skit :)
I'm not disagreeing that many managers don't do this. Or that they do it badly. But managers, when they work properly, do a lot more than liaising.
That's the thing, though. Almost no one does their job "properly". They do it well enough to not get fired - thus management is usually inept and useless. So is it the managers fault when they are just fulfilling the norm or is it the job all together? I would suggest management as a position is at fault rather than the people who occupy that space and do the minimum to get by.
Coaching happens naturally within a well-functioning team.
Sheltering a lot of times means that the team is not aware of key information they should be aware of.
Coordination can be accomplished via proper use of communication tools.
Managers have the power to insert themselves at the critical junctions of natural process flows in order to artificially increase their own importance.
The funny thing is, if you do all those things, but you don't "liaise", then it's very likely that your job-title isn't "manager", but rather "administrative assistant." Sadly, I've never heard of a team of engineers having a dedicated admin assistant.
A lot of corporate malaise could be solved, I think, by
1. giving each team the budget to hire their own admin assistant to coordinate and coach for them (but to leave the liase-ing to the team lead), and then
2. firing all the middle-management layers that now serve literally no purpose.
In my experience, what does a manager do if there's no one around to manage?
Deal with weird interpersonal issues of members on the team. Seriously, if you've never been a manager before, it will shock you some of the childish things people complain to you about.
I do agree with you that the ideal is to have the team be self-managing, but there is usually some maturing that needs to happen among the team to reach that goal.
> How does this work? Rather than a company asking an employee what their salary range is, the employee asks the company what is the most they can afford to pay you, and they pay you that.
I still don't see how that works. Your comment seems like it boils down to saying the company should pay the employee more than they're worth (i.e. worth to the business compared to others who could add the same value), but the company has all sorts of obligations to investors, other employees, etc. and spending money just because they can afford to do so today seems like an irresponsible way to run a business.
Sure, but it's just as irresponsible (economically irrational) as an individual to go the other way.
Really, the "optimal" salary negotiation is for both the employer and the potential hire to first agree on a dollar-value of how much money the employee is expected to make the company—literally, what the hire is worth—and then, having come to agreement over that, to then negotiate what profit margin the company wants to keep of that created value.
You might recognize this as the process a hiring agency goes through to negotiate with an employer. In this case, the employee is their own hiring agency, and the one who will end up with the majority "cut."
In my experience, what does a manager do if there's no one around to manage?
And how do employees get recognized for their contributions if there are no managers to track it?
It's a catch-22. My thought is that if companies simply paid people as much as they could, all of this would go away. You wouldn't even _need_ managers anymore. One of managers' more important roles, liaising between departments, could become their full time job, which would be better for everyone too (less overhead with employee reviews and bullshit like that).
How does this work? Rather than a company asking an employee what their salary range is, the employee asks the company what is the most they can afford to pay you, and they pay you that.