This isn’t going to be the last Gervais / MacLeod post (first: here; most recent: here) and I don’t think there is a closed-form solution, so much as something I’m paddling toward. I’m still getting incrementally closer to “the coup”, but I think there’s at least one more topic I must cover before I can do that. I’ve ripped on managers, as a class, quite a lot. I feel like I have to answer the question: can managers be good? You might be surprised to hear me say this, but the answer’s “yes”. We need to revisit the concept of the job, though.

Based on what I’ve had to say about open allocation, one might think that I’m anti-manager. Indeed, I’ve been in technology for almost a decade and I can confidently say that, as a category, managers take away a lot more than they add. Most of them are ruinous and damage productivity severely, bringing organizations down to a tenth of what they could be. Good managers are rare; bad ones are common. I’ll first get into some of the archetypes that I’ve seen, to explain the kinds of badness.

Types of technology managers

1. Volcanos

The stereotype of the evil boss is the “cartoon asshole”– constantly yelling, insulting, and verbally humiliating his subordinates– and I don’t think they’re that dangerous. They’re verbally abusive, emotionally incontinent, and erratic, but they actually aren’t that dangerous from a careerist perspective. First, they’re predictable. Second, if someone wears his character flaws on his sleeve like that, he’s not powerful. He’ll fire you in the heat of the moment on Thursday, then try to rehire you on Monday. I know someone who fired his CTO at least ten times. The CTO was stoic about these unplanned long weekends. This is dysfunctional and extremely stressful, but it’s rarely individually threatening.

You can usually coast, most of the time, if you have a Volcano as a boss, so long as you seem loyal and dedicated. Don’t leave at 6:00 if he had a meltdown at 4:45. Always take his side on everything. Work hard when there’s an actual external deadline for which it’ll hurt him if things are missed. He’ll never forgive you if he sees you as disloyal. If you keep him seeing you as “on his side”, however, you can work at quarter-speed because these bosses create environments where no one’s getting anything done.

2. Psychopaths

I call these guys “The New Boss” because they’re rarely in one managerial position for long. They rise quickly. Unfortunately, if you’re a high-talent individual, you’ll be the first one that one of these targets. Most bosses realize that it’s unethical to compete with their subordinates. Psychopaths don’t. They use the temporary power advantage to take everything they can, and a high-talent person is a long-term threat that must be shot down.

One thing about Psychopaths is that they’re rarely official bosses. If the manager has a favorite– a “golden child” or desk ornament– there’s a good chance that he’s a Psychopath. Being a managerial favorite is great from a Psychopath’s perspective. There’s no accountability, and the Psychopath will probably outlive his manager (and might even be the one to do him in). This is one of the reasons why I think “too good” people (including myself) don’t make the best managers. They’re not great judges of character, so someone horrible gets their ear and everything goes to hell.

Psychopaths do a great job of exploiting the other boss archetypes. They also have a behavioral pattern that might seem not to make sense. Psychopaths love social competition, and they start it even when there’s nothing to gain. A Psychopath is always targeting someone. Why? Practice. Most of the harmful social games that Psychopaths play aren’t done for direct gain. They’re done for amusement in part, but also as a way for the Psychopath to test his abilities so that, when a social competition with actual stakes emerges, he can win it. This, I should note, is not always a conscious process. People who enjoy social competition don’t have that particular self-awareness. They perceive it as malicious fun, not practice for anything larger. But it is probably the case that the evolutionary purpose for the psychopath’s love of social experimentation and competition comes from an r-strategic source; it’s where they learn the social skills necessary to play that game.

Why do Psychopaths so quickly become managerial favorites? The answer is that managers have two jobs: managing up and down, and only get paid for the first of these. The Psychopath/golden-child makes himself appear competent to take over the “managing down”, work he does for his own malicious purposes, enabling the actual boss (whose ear he has, and whose credibility he uses to advance his own agenda) to focus full time on managing up.

3. Limp Paddles

Bill Lumbergh, from Office Space, is a Limp Paddle. “I’m also going to need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday.” (Emphasis mine.) On some level, the Limp Paddle wishes he were able to motivate people without resorting to authority. He has no charisma, and on some level, he knows it. He just can’t motivate people to do things. He can’t build teams or figure out what people want from him, because his social skills are so poor. This makes him really insecure, and he compensates by taking a “Theory X” approach to employees. It’s not his lack of charisma that’s the problem, but their lack of dedication, intellect, and decency. It’s not him, it’s them. At the core of the Limp Paddle is an armor of denial about this.

Limp Paddles and Volcanos share this insecurity, but Limp Paddles are more stuck in it. Volcanos are typically highly intelligent but socially underdeveloped, but they can rise to the executive ranks if their creativity is recognized. That’s not common, but it’s a possibility. The Limp Paddle can’t. He was never “cool”, and he’s rarely smart, and he has almost no chance of getting higher than middle management, because he’s so pervasively mediocre.

While Limp Paddles are not explicitly evil, they are passive-aggressive and will tear down a talented subordinate out of their own insecurity. They’ll surprise a good employee with a bad review to “show who’s boss”, mindless of the fact that the target’s career within that firm has been ruined. (Most companies, these days, use Enron-style performance reviews, meaning that review history is part of an employee’s transfer packet.) They do a lot of damage, and they do it stupidly because they’re so goddamn insecure about their terminal middle-manager status and their underlying problem, which they’re either unwilling or powerless to solve: the fact that they can’t motivate shit to stink.

4. Chickenhawks

Michael Scott, in The Office, is one of these. Unlike the Limp Paddle, he has social skills and can inspire loyalty. However, he’s reminiscent of the high school sports coach who (a) never fully grew up, and (b) takes an unhealthy amount of interest in the personal lives of adolescents. Some Chickenhawks cross genders and some don’t. It’s not always about sex, and it doesn’t always mirror sexual preference. (Michael Scott is fully heterosexual, but Chickenhawks off Ryan and, to a lesser extent, Jim.) What they have, however, is an attraction to youth. They feel like they didn’t get their younger years right– didn’t go to an Ivy League school, have enough sex, do enough drugs, be stylish enough– and they’re drawn to the playing of favorites in order to live vicariously through their proteges. 

For Psychopaths, Chickenhawks are the easiest to exploit. Volcanos are erratic and Limp Paddles are uniformly mean to everyone, which means Psychopaths have to be cautious. Chickenhawks, though, want to be sold something and once the manager is sold, the favorite/desk-ornament can do no wrong. Chickenhawks want to feel cool again and, instead of buying a sports car or having an affair, they take a protege 20 years younger who still goes to nightclubs and has tried a few of the newest designer drugs– and, inadvertently, also give that person unilateral termination power over the the rest of the team. 

Chickenhawks are one of the worst kinds of managers, not because of what they do, but because of what happens when they pick up a favorite (inerrantly, a Psychopath who gets more sex than the Chickenhawk did at that age). If your Chickenhawk manager is unloaded (he has no desk ornament; his last one left him) then you will almost never get fired because Chickenhawks lack courage when unloaded, and the standard of work will be low. However, the loaded Chickenhawk will come down on you if his desk ornament (who is now his brain, and decides who the “performers” are) decides to attack you.

5. Executives

Being an Executive– a lazy “big picture” guy who wants others to implement his ideas– is more of an attitude than a matter of position. There are middle-managers who fancy themselves executives, and there are VP-level people who haven’t “learned” yet that they’re above any kind of work that involves accountability (including managing people). I’m talking about attitude as much as I am about rank.

What is the difference between an executive and a manager? Managers still have jobs, not sinecures. An executive’s job is just to Make Decisions and one of the perks is being unaccountable, because the executive can always blame subordinates for failing to implement his brilliant ideas properly.

Executives (small and big e-) don’t want to manage. They like the idea of holding power, but not the responsibility of using it correctly. They’re extremely toxic, because the only “work” they do is to make decisions that affect other people, and therefore criticizing an Executive’s decision becomes a personal affront. You’re effectively saying that he sucks at his job, in the context of how he defined it. The problem with the Executive is that (a) he holds the power, and (b) he’ll refuse to back down, because in his mind, the conversation isn’t about the decision, but about him. He’ll exhaust you into submission, extract a promise-by-default because you’re so worn-out, and then scream at you for failing to meet it– if he remembers the discussion, and the one nice thing about Executives is that they rarely remember what they told you to do yesterday.

Relevant to the Executive archetype is the engineer-manager impedance mismatch. As a software programmer, I’m routinely told by my “subordinate” (the compiler) that I fucked up at my job. Over minor typos, the machine yells back at me, “Fix your shit or I’m not doing anything.” It simply won’t do anything if I give it nonsensical instructions. It’s frustrating! But it’s also a part of how I see the world. I like blunt feedback. Loud failure draws attention and I can fix it. Silent failure is the worst. Executives don’t think this way. If they hand down nonsensical or conflicting requirements, your job is to “make it work anyway”, not push back (like a machine) until their instructions make sense. If you push back against a bad instruction (in the way that a compiler would, and we like that) he can’t separate (a) your concerns about the decision, which may have been horrible, and (b) his perception that your objection is a slight against him and his ability to lead. Programmers get regular feedback about mistakes they made; executives never do. That’s why they’re so much more arrogant than we are, despite our reputation.

Executives are horrible. No one can audit their decisions without ending up in a personal flamewar, so the independent thinkers quit or get fired and they’re left with a bouquet of yes-men.

6. Non-Managing Managers

You see a lot of these coming out of academia. They’re genuinely nice people. They work very hard, and they’re usually very smart. They don’t like holding authority. They don’t like telling people what to do. Over a small trust-dense team, they’re great. They’re available when needed, but would prefer to write code and read papers over being “The Boss”. Because they get out of their subordinates’ way and treat them like colleagues, the people below them do great work.

There’s a fatal flaw here, which is that they don’t scale well. Non-Managing Managers are great when they lead small groups of high-quality people who function as a genuine team, and their bosses notice this and give them more responsibility and more reports to manage. After about 20 people, however, the Non-Managing Manager gets overwhelmed. He didn’t sign up for all the meetings, for having to write reviews, and for all of the conflict resolution work that becomes an ongoing slog at that team size. At 60 people, there are Lord of the Flies dynamics going on below them and they’re oblivious to it. Non-Managing Managers fall down when young-wolf conflicts (i.e. Psychopaths trying to become managerial favorites) start to tear apart the team.

There are two subtypes of Non-Managing Managers. The first is what I call the Public Servant. Je doesn’t like managing, but sees it as an interpersonal and administrative duty the company requires of him, and when he starts out on this path, he’s extremely good at it. The problem with the Public Servant is that, after a few years, he stops liking the job– and if they can’t enjoy managing the work, how can they motivate their reports who are doing that work? Public Servants are the subtype of managers who truly are good people, but they turn bitter after a few years. Once they get tired, they’re no longer able to see young-wolf conflicts before it’s too late and they can’t police the team, much less motivate people to get things done.

The second is the Interesting Work Guy (or Gal). That’s me and, unfortunately, we tend to make above-average but not great managers.

The Interesting Work Gal is also a genuinely good person, but not the best manager. She’s sick of getting assigned slop work that bores her and hurts her career. She realizes that most companies create an arrangement wherein you either control the division of labor or it controls you, and she’d prefer the former. She becomes a boss because she wants dibs on the most interesting work, not because she wants to tell people what to do. Unfortunately, there are two problems with this. First, if she’s perceived to be “taking” interesting work from subordinates, they’ll sabotage her and she won’t know why. (She’s not maliciously or parasitically trying to “steal” work from them, and often she doesn’t know that others covet it; she just does what she wants to do.) Second, she’s loading herself up with two often-competing full-time jobs (people management, and the work she finds interesting) and will typically perform poorly at both.

By the way, I should delineate between the Interesting Work Guy, and the “I’m a big-picutre person” Executive. They are fundamentally different. The Executive is a lazy narcissist who wants to be rewarded and admired without having to work for it, or for doing “the fun work” that has no difficulty in it. He’s “not a details person”, which really means that he doesn’t want to do anything but Make Decisions. He’s a parasite. You shouldn’t just take him out of management; you should fire him because he’s a lazy jerk who will poison your company. Interesting Work Guy, on the other hand, has a genuine desire to work. He may be a mediocre manager, but he is excellent as an independent employee with a very high degree of autonomy. What Interesting Work Guy needs is hands-off management and an extremely rare (in the corporate context) degree of autonomy. He needs an escape from the manage-or-be-managed world, because he’ll only perform at his best when free on both sides from power relationships.

So after all that bad, is there good? Or, why do we need managers?

I’m a believer in Valve’s open allocation philosophy. I think that’s the right idea. Projects should compete for engineers (if no one’s willing to bet her career on something, it ain’t worth doing) rather than the reverse. However, I don’t actually believe that managers are completely unnecessary. Do managers, as a class, take more out of technology companies than they add? Yes, because incompetents are systematically selected for the role. However, I can’t in good conscience say that management is “completely unnecessary”. That’s not the case.

Social exclusion and competition will happen even if there aren’t official “managers”. Now, managers tend to make the situation worse because one only needs to convince one person that a target is “not performing” to flush the target out of the company, but the behaviors that make modern work hell are age-old and don’t require official authority for them to exist. They’ll emerge naturally. Some people will start telling others what to do, threatening each other with social and professional extortions, and creating their own malignant credibility systems as gossip congeals into the “official record” of peoples’ job performances. Official management (with the power of unilateral termination) makes these extortions and mobbings much easier, because fewer people have to be brought in (sometimes without their knowledge) to them, but they’d happen anyway.

A good manager (and these are extremely rare in technology; maybe 1 in 100) spots that shit from a mile away and shoots it from a bridge. Young-wolf conflict? Inappropriate delegation? Hostility and gossip? Zzzziiiip! Sniped. Fucker drops dead. Thud.

A manager is a cop. I think it’s obvious that most of the managerial archetypes above– even the obvious good-person cases like Interesting Work Guy– describe people who are not cut out for police work.

Of course, there are great people in law enforcement, and there are also some horrible ones. Some are dedicated public servants. Others do the job because they enjoy authority and power. Some are clean and some are dirty, and I’m not going to debate what percentage is which because I honestly have no idea, but the job is utterly necessary. You need a police force to keep society functioning. That said, successful societies make their jobs clear: police are there to enforce the law, not make it. When a society degrades to the point where police get to change the law on a whim, many become extortionist thugs rather than servants of the public. This becomes perverse and self-reinforcing, because dirty cops tend to gang up on and drive out the clean ones they can’t corrupt. Also, dirty cops have a huge advantage; they’re cheaper. In many of the more corrupt countries, policemen are poorly paid, or unpaid, they make their money “on the economy”. Most of these dynamics have parallels in the corporate world. Management is an internal police force by design, and most of them are quite dirty.

Why is this? Why do companies produce a squadron of dirty police officers but very rarely end up with any clean ones? One of the answers is obvious: corporations aren’t built on top of laws, but on the shifting sands of reputation and credibility and personality cults, and only about 1 person in 500 has the charisma to be stably successful in such an environment without resorting to extortion. That’s the first problem. If you don’t have laws, you’ll have thugs taking a might-makes-right approach. Without snipers on the bridge to take out Psychopaths in the young-wolf/manager-favorite stage, those will end up with all the power, and it will be too late.

I think, however, the bigger problem is that there’s a fundamental dishonesty about what managers are supposed to do. Employees want to be mentored and supported. The very top brass (which adheres to a Theory X mentality) wants an internal police force to make sure that the proles don’t steal (including, in the white-collar context, “time theft” in prioritizing their own career goals over official work). Middling executives want point-men for various internal efforts (e.g. project managers). Managers themselves have differing desires, according to the archetypes above. Unfortunately, though, there’s an arrangement in which no one good wants to do police work, while everyone bad does. Why? Well, it’s not very glamorous in its own right. If you’re a clean cop, you’re just enforcing laws that other people wrote. In the public, this is fine because there are sound reasons for supporting those laws. In a corporation, these “laws” are frequently themselves drawn out of the fears and desires of parasitic oligarchs (dirty top cops) with authority. Corporations usually end up expecting their internal police to do dirty work. Clean cops don’t want to do it. Dirty cops, on the other hand, love that. It’s not that they enjoy doing evil work on others’ behalf (except insofar as it gives them dirt on powerful people) but that they can usually use their positions of power for the own extortions, and their bosses rarely mind that they’re doing it.

What companies call management is actually a conflation of six jobs:

1. Making large-scale decisions that affect a lot of people, especially pertaining to careers and incomes. (This is the job that Executives want.) 
2. Public leadership and making the company look good to the outside world. (What CEOs really do.)
3. Executing specific projects and goals. (Project management.)
4. Serving as an internal police force to protect the company from its people. (Theory-X people management.)
5. Serving as an internal police force to protect the company’s people from each other. (For example, by sniping young wolves.)
6. Coaching junior employees, allocating work properly, and bringing talent forward. (Theory-Y people management, or mentoring.)

Unfortunately, these jobs all compete with each other. You can’t be someone’s mentor if you’re also responsible for preventing that person from “stealing” by prioritizing his career goals over explicit direction; that’s a huge conflict of interest. You need to pick one job or the other. Most managers end up prioritizing “managing up” and neglect jobs #5 and #6, whose beneficiaries are powerless. Some relish the authority that comes with #4; others want to grow toward the “fun work” of #1-3 and simply use the extortions afforded by #4– “you support my career goals or I fire you”– to get there.

Solving It

How does a company solve this problem? What does it need to have that thing of extreme rarity (at least in technology): genuinely good management? Here are some thoughts.

1. You need actual laws. If the police are the law, that’s innately dysfunctional. But that’s what most companies are like. Unless an employee represents a direct lawsuit threat, companies are more than happy to give managers unilateral authority over that person’s career for the sake of “project expediency”. That’s a terrible arrangement. Companies should put serious work into setting an “Employee Bill of Rights” and a set of laws to protect people. Open allocation, for example, is a good law: employees have the right to allocate their time to any project that benefits the company.
   
2. You need cops (very few) who don’t enjoy the work too much, but do it very well. The archetype coming to mind is Mike (an ex-cop turned hit man) from Breaking Bad. He doesn’t enjoy killing people. He’s given a job and he does it well. He doesn’t enjoy it, and he won’t do it for personal gain. Companies do need, after a certain point, to give at least one person the full-time job of sniping young wolves and preventing abuse of power vacuums. Also, the sniper should have no other job that conflicts with that one. (He can work on other things, such as recruiting or programming, but he’s evaluated based on his police work.) If he’s responsible for delivering on a project or he’s competing for executive roles against other people, he’ll be tempted to use that gun inappropriately. If he’s the type of guy who enjoys being “The Boss”, he’ll wave his gun around and no one will get anything done. If he has another job that’s important to his career, he’ll be tempted to play favorites, and that’s intolerable. He needs to be out of the way except when a young-wolf conflict is about to happen. I recommend hiring an older person (with no interest in positional advancement) for this job and, of course, not making it explicit that he or she is “the police”. I think it goes without saying it should not be a glamorous role; you don’t want people with giant egos doing that kind of work.
3. You don’t need other “people management”, except for mentors. If you have principled police who take down young wolves and prevent inappropriate arrogation, incivility, and social exclusion– and who are, other than that, out of the way– you simply don’t need the other kinds of management (project managers, “tech leads”) titles. Self-organization will take care of that stuff! What you do need is a culture that encourages mentorship: investment in the junior people who have no power (and little to offer, immediately) but will become core players of the organization in the future. Now, this is a role that your police can’t fulfill. I repeat, they cannot be doing it. It’s not that there’s a dissonance of roles, because junior employees and good police (who protect the weak, by sniping the young wolves who’d otherwise gaslight junior employees and become unofficial managers, or just eat them alive) are actually natural allies. There’s a different reason why police can’t be mentors. You can’t have them playing favorites, ever. That said, just as much as you need police to protect the transiently weak junior employees, you need a culture of mentorship that gives them the knowledge and power to become the highly-productive more senior ones who’ll make your company great.

In sum, the duties collected together under “management” need to be separated. Law enforcement is needed, but they should be doing just that, and not have alternative careers (project management, executive ambitions) that create gigantic conflicts of interest. Project management and decision-making belong with the people, and shouldn’t be hogged by bike-shedding narcissists who arrogate unilateral authority over that stuff because it’s “the fun work”. Finally, the most important thing is to have a mentorship culture that brings people along to the point where they can deliver major world-improving contributions. You do need police to protect the weak, but you also need mentors whose ultimate goal is to make everyone strong.