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It seems to me that once your middle management is infested with the wrong kind of non-tech people (because you couldn't resist "growing" forever), you don't stand a chance anymore.

To me it seems this is what happened to Larry & Sergey, too.




> It seems to me that once your middle management is infested with non-tech people (because you couldn't resist "growing" forever), you don't stand a chance anymore.

I fixed a redundancy for you.

Otherwise, spot on, and if I had one of those vinyl printers my wife uses to put things like “Home is where your heart is” on the wall, I’d print this, and hang it secretly on the bathroom walls at work.

I’m experiencing this right now sadly. Came to work at a company a decade ago with a lot of equality and flat/low management. Engineers of various disciplines were predominantly middle/older, so there was a sense of “we’re all adults here” and it’s worked pretty well for a long time. But as staff is retiring and the business is growing because it forking worked well, the cry for more middle management to “scale” has been heard. Need point people. Points of responsibility. Because we can’t spare real engineers, these are often people with “some engineering in their background” or just know how to play the good buddy network really well and evoke a sense of “trust.” The relationship that’s emerging now with middle management layers is more the family structure. Instead of being a group of collaborative light management adults, the middle manager assumes the parent role, and the workers become the kids. They get to take less risk, be less responsible and avoid the “adulting” stuff that is (endless) meetings and the like. The management/parents obsess about the way their group/family is seen elsewhere in the company. Protecting them name and reputation takes an increased precedence. The “adult kids”, the experiences engineers who want to be treated like adults and not over managed, start looking for a new home to move to.

It’s sad really.


Flat management hasn't really worked well for Valve. With no formal power structures they seem to have just formed informal power structures which aren't necessairly pushing the company forward...


As I see it, most every structure works when you've got a fountain of never ending cash. The true test of a corporate structure is when that fountain starts to run dry or there was never a fountain to begin with. Facebook is hitting that wall now.


I think it depends on what “worked well” means.

They have stagnated product wise but it seems that their employees are happy and they make enough money to be profitable.

I think this is also a function of their competitors being jerks (Epic) or not really caring (Apple App Store). So a true competitor could likely eat their lunch if they really wanted to.


If valve didn't have access to free effortless money then it's informal structures might look very different by necessity. As of now there must not be much drive to change anything.


People misunderstand the Peter Principle.

Why do you think our startup heroes were failed from below, rather than simply "having been promoted to the level of their incompetence"?

Dilbert, et al, rewrote the principle as, you promote the incompetent so they don't interfere with the real work. Or maybe that brown-nosers get promoted until they get fired. Or that the more incompetent you are the more you get promoted. But it's always been about how smart people who do good work end up in over their heads.

The reward for a job well done is another job, a harder or different job. Eventually you run up against a harder, bigger, different job you just can't hack. It doesn't matter if you're being promoted by your manager, yourself, or the invisible hand of the market.


yup. I live the Peter principle every day. Its really that your promoted because you were good at your old job, but that doesn't guarantee that you are good at your new job, and eventually you get promoted to a job you're not good at. Where I work, a lot of excellent tech people have been promoted into management positions, and we all suck at it. We're better at tech.


> that once your middle management is infested with the wrong kind of non-tech people

Surely that's the responsibility of the CEO/chairman/board who recruit and direct the staff?


Over a long enough time, everything is. The question is whether they had a better alternative along the path. If many/most companies are infested, the wrong kind of middle management must be quite common. If it’s quite common, avoiding hiring from it (or avoiding the effects when you do) could be very difficult. It’s still a problem that lands on their desks, but might be less “how could they be so stupid?!” than portrayed above.


Yes, but it's easy to get overwhelmed during that explosive growth phase and, well, see the Steve Jobs anecdote about "A players". Once the damage is done it's hard/impossible to undo.


Yeah I reckon at Google, that came from above. That was Schmidt.

> "There is what I call the creepy line," he said, according to The Hill. "The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it."


Schmidt ran the company relatively well. Googles issue is the lack of focus and rewarding technically complex 10x ideas. Meaning long term recurring compound gains is not rewarded.




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