• 7 Posts
  • 256 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • I say this as someone who has worked for small companies, large companies, NGOs, and non-hierarchical collectives.

    When you start working on something that is complex, and has a lot of moving parts, you need conductors. If you’ve got a better real-world example of an organizational model that works, I’m all ears.

    Even in Leninist Russia, workplace structures had people managers in place to facilitate planning and to ensure that a team was aligned and set up to successfully accomplish a goal.

    I’ve only ever seen one org structure that didn’t need some sort of people facilitation layer. And that was a tiny commune that a buddy of mine lived on. And everyone knew each other for years before they established said commune.


  • A lot of us here work in software. Often times there are two tracks, IC and people management. Often times both of those tracks pay similarly.

    The good people managers and directors are usually folk that were identified as being good at mentoring people and good at providing air cover so people could do good work.

    I’m sorry you’ve never worked at a place with good middle management. It does exist in many places, and many people selected it because they like working with the people and the strategy more than the product directly. Often times these people could’ve been paid comparably by working as a staff or principal track engineer or experience designer.