Comment by Aurornis 4 days ago
> He told me that he had worked to develop a tool that would replace effectively all of the middle management function that he was responsible for: gathering information from folks below him, distilling it down and reporting that to people above him.
Any manager whose job was this simple was on borrowed time anyway.
I think the person was feeding you a story around the campfire to impress you. Real management work doesn't operate like this.
I got the brunt of this when Amazon banned me from KDP for life over a complete nonsense hallucination by a fraud detection bot.
I thought at some point I'd get to talk to a human who would immediately say "Oh this is ridiculous, sorry." Nope. I just got passed around between either more bots or offshore customer support employees, with I assume a gigantic incentive to not go against the fraud detection bot, until I ran out of appeals.
One of the most soul-sucking experiences I've ever gone through. I can't imagine the toxic culture that produced that system.
>they brought a toxic culture and destroyed more value than they created
Yeah, I've been in one of such places.
Yup
Why did you leave Amazon?
> I couldn't stand the management culture
Sooo... Why are you trying to bring it with you
No, this is exactly how Amazon management works.
Members of a team creates a report explaining the state of their small section of the business, usually a 2x2 grid of boxes to fill.
This is then reviewed, usually in an in person meeting that requires full team participation.
These are joined together to create a weekly business review, that will require another meeting to review.
Each month the WBRs are combined to created the monthly business review, with a massive meeting requiring participation by multiple teams.
The pyramid of documents and meetings continues all the way up to the CEO.
I should probably point out, none of this information is unavailable at any level, its copied and pasted from system to 2x2 then copied from doc to doc. It's a spectacle that needs to be seen to be believed.
And that just the reporting, planning is another exercise in multiple report writing that I'll save for another day. But, hopefully you get the idea.
Amazon is 90% internal document writing and 70% work (9-5 does not really exist, it could, it just doesnt).
It's essentially a massive jobs program for middle management that aren't capable enough to join the TSA and that's being unfair to the TSA.
The only reason I can think for the existence of the reporting is to give managers something to do between pipping staff.
Also, if you bite them after telling them five times "please don't touch me", it's somehow your fault.
Actually I've worked at companies where management is exactly like this. Literally just status updates and asking when things are going to be finished. I have no respect for middle managers whatsoever. These people are a parasite on the industry.
Ok, Ok, I get the disdain for middle management. It's basically exactly like you described, but middle management didn't come about for no reason. There really is a value and the idea of automating it away with AI is extremely dubious.
One could even argue that middle management is THE most critical role in corporations over a certain size. In that it is the glue that allows them to get to that size. But it's also what gave rise to things like Dilbert and the idea of rising to the level of your own incompetence.
Middle management is like the lug nuts on a wheel. If you start with 5, you can take one away and be OK, even two and no issues with normal driving. You can go down to two and as long as you aren't hitting large bumps and they aren't adjacent you mostly likely will be fine for a short trip. You could even remove ALL of the lug nuts and if you travel in straight line over a smooth road you can still drive.
After all they mostly just sit there, the tire, the transmission, all the other parts of the car are doing the work. But it's not fair to say that any of the removed lug nuts were doing nothing.
The point of middle management isn't really to do anything spectacular on a daily basis. If the company is working well, middle management effectively has no function. It's when things get out of line. Even then though, it's not really middle management that's calling the shots or fixing the problem, but they are critical in noticing the problems and directing resources. Middle management's role is in reducing the time that things are out of line.
At least that's the idea, and much like any position, the bulk of the group benefits are overwhelmingly produced by the groups most effective producers.
Middle management is the hardest role to hire while simultaneously being the hardest to gauge employee effectiveness.
This is most definitely an overgeneralization, but in my experience, engineers that constantly talk shit about management are either shitty engineers themselves or they're incredibly difficult to work with and blame everyone else for their shortcomings.
Middle management is playing a completely different game. I don't envy them one bit.
Sure, there are toxic cultures created by bad management, but that can be said about any leadership role. There is a reason for the hierarchy, if you think you have a better approach to structuring a company, have at it.
Well said! I'd also add that a critical function of middle management in healthy companies is bidirectional information communication: sharing what their teams are doing up and sharing leadership priorities down.
Having worked at some dysfunctional companies where that didn't happen (and a few companies that were amazing at it), it makes a difference at scale.
Nothing is more disheartening than working your ass off as an IC, shipping, then finding out that your VP pivoted approach and your project won't be used.
Middle management is a tremendous market for lemons. It's difficult to do well, and each layer requires a very different skillset. One of the side effects of the hypergrowth era of big tech between 2008-2023 is that a lot of managers were needed to support the amount of hiring, and they weren't very well trained, and often they could claim success for a rising tide almost by default as long as they didn't do anything too blatantly stupid.
The Peter Principle is of course well-known, but one of the insidious things is that once you have enough incompetent management and they are entrenched for a while, they will teach all the wrong lessons to an entire generation of new hires coming in. Due to the incentives and optics of large orgs, managers tend to spin everything in a positive light publicly, and the real unfiltered discussions of failure happen in tighter circles. At some point a lot of "successful" folks can have job hopped their way through a bunch of brand name companies just cargo culting on what they've seen done before with no real understanding of how their work actually impacts the company's bottom line.
This is one of the reasons I'm incredibly thankful to have spent most of my early career in small companies and startups where the big picture was so much easier to see.
What a great defense of middle managers. I need to steal this!
> management ... literally just status updates and asking when things are going to be finished.
True. But there are many people whose productivity slumps unless they are asked for progress updates every day. You have to offset this against the people whose productivity slumps BECAUSE they are asked for updates every day. In large orgs with unknown quality of people I guess it's not impossible that middle managers add value.
In the past, my job has been exactly this.
A few times I took my hands off the wheel to see if I was truly redundant. Let's just say, I wasn't.
At worst, I was the only one looking at the schedule.
At best, I was a support mechanism for people working on an absolutely boring product.
>> gathering information from folks below him, distilling it down and reporting that to people above him.
> Real management work doesn't operate like this.
I agree but in the opposite direction. So many managers not only doing that but doctoring, filtering and tainting it as well. So AI would be more effective for the most of bad managers.
I left amazon, in part, because of this realization: Much of management was exactly doing that. That was back in the BERT days and even then writing was on the wall.
I’m more surprised that it’s not believable for some of management depending on how process driven there job is.
I’ve definitely had roles where I sadly realized I’m automating the QA person next to me well before LLMs were mainstream.
In my experience I think, you would automate enough of a mid manager role that upper management doesn’t care for, and whatever left over responsibilities that couldn’t be automated is split between a high level IC and the next above. Then the bureaucracy sells is as a success.
you would be amazed at the amount of middle managers who keep failing upwards in organizations like Amazon
Happens in the Govt too. I think it's pretty common that if you can "sell a story" you're in a better spot than simply doing well at the job.
Seems like Amazon is doing the right thing cutting down its corporate workforce then.
Fake management is far more common than real management. Most of management is centered around hyper-realistic work like activities.