Advantages of Incompetent Management

I think it worked pretty well for quite a few years. It gradually stopped working when the company acquired a large company with a different culture and also hired people (well, managers mostly) who weren't aligned with the culture. Eventually this basically disappeared when the company was acquired by Kodak.

I've seen flavors of this in other places. Famously Andy Grove of Intel also preached that decisions need to be made by those closest to the decision and empowered people to make the right decisions. More generally this can be reflected in a servant-leadership model where leadership sees itself as facilitating the growth of the people underneath them.

Another requirement for this to work well is that management (e.g. the CEO or other leaders) are able to lay down a broad strategy for the people of the company to execute on. If the leadership has no strategy then tactical decisions can not be made properly. They also need to make sure there's coordination and structure.

This explains so much. It also sounds like broken water laws in the western US that incentivise farmers to intentionally waste water to preserve their future ability to waste water.

We had an official manager, a "branch head", who was worse than incompetent. He couldn't find his butt with both hands, but he also thought he was God's gift to management, and would forcefully and emphatically make bad decision after bad decision.

Eventually, he had screwed up the group's major program so thoroughly it looked like a sure fire failure, and he found another job, and didn't bother to tell anyone; he just stopped showing up for work one day.

The level of management above him had bigger problems to deal with than replacing him, so they made sure we had a competent secretary and left us alone for two and a half years. It turned out to be arguably the most productive period of my professional life. My buddy and I took over business development. THe team turned the big project around and made it a rousing success, and grew the funding from it by two orders of magnitude.

The point being: there's bad management, that acts randomly or not at all; and then there's really bad management, which takes up your days with constantly changing orders, fixing relationships with customers or sponsors that they've screwed up, and levying time-taxes in the form of training, reports, and morale boosting exercises.

If given a choice between bad management and really bad management, pick bad management.

Fifteen years later, my buddy runs the place and I'm the senior scientist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuver_warfare

Decisions should be made by those with the best information. Sometimes that person is not the leader, and opportunities should just be seized by someone at a low-level. When this happens, leadership should back these initiatives. My favourite example of this is the Battle of Arsuf during the Third Crusade.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Arsuf

Richard the Lionheart of England spent weeks slowly marching down the coast with his heavily armoured cavalry/infantry, getting harassed by Saladin's faster cavalry. His army of 10k men could not attack and break formation, since Saladin's cavalry was faster and could pick off Richard's men.

Richard's goal was to wait until Saladin's horses got tired, and when that opportunity arose, charge and catch him while he was slow.

After a few weeks of nothing, suddenly one of his units (the Knights Hospitallier), led by Baldwin le Carron, started to charge on Saladin. Richard the Lionheart had no way of knowing if this was a good idea (to this day we don't know why Baldwin made his decision) but he immediately backed the charge with all 10k of his men and defeated Saladin's army.

This wasn't being lazy or poor management. Richard understood that he did not have the information needed to execute his strategy, so he delegated it to his officers.

When Baldwin le Carron made a decision Richard didn't understand, Richard didn't ask for a Jira ticket or a design doc, so he would have more information to make his decision (as a "good" manager should). He trusted his subordinates and won.

I believe software engineers are getting the wrong idea about a company being in "war mode".

If one reads military strategy, a proven tactic for leaders is outlining strategy and trusting your subordinates to execute it, because feeding information upwards takes too long.

As an aside, I’ve been lucky enough to have sufficient influence at all my employers for removing unnecessary layers of interviews. Anecdotally, most average engineers would be at least half as productive at most jobs out there. A couple of interviews at most would increase the odds significantly in the employers favour. Google scale could be an exception, but for 90% startup and mid sized corporations, the 3-4 technical interview rounds and algorithm problems are an absolute overkill.

This should be true but I've seen bloated projects that would have had better outcomes had the team been more constrained.

And to quote Fred Brooks:

> There are many examples from other arts and crafts that lead one to believe that discipline is good for art. Indeed, an artist's aphorism asserts,'Form is liberating' The worst buildings are those whose budget was too great for the purposes to be served. Bach's creative output hardly seems to have been squelched by the necessity of producing a limited-form cantata each week. I am sure that the Stretch computer would have had a better architecture had it been more tightly constrained; the constraints imposed by the System/360 Model 30's budget were in my opinion entirely beneficial for the Model 75's architecture.

Embedded is maybe the last refuge of where there are hard resource constraints that cannot be violated. If you only have 64K of RAM, you had better make it work!

IMHO this is why you can end up with embedded code that is easily 10x to 100x more optimized than code running in other environments. It is also, why IMHO, the user experience on Smart Phones doesn't improve linearly with the hardware improvements - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

This train of thought, along with basically flatlined GPU performance / $, explains also why we are seeing real algorithmic improvements in the ML/AI space. If we were still operating under Moore's law and GPUs and VRAM were 2xing every couple of years, I doubt we'd see all the research efforts going into optimizing training, fine tuning, context windows, inference, and so forth.

A common theme is that optimization usually does mostly bad things, while maybe arguably from someone's perspective doing one thing really well. I particularly like the example of the threshold cost to get something done versus the optimizer trying to lower costs. Both stakeholders in that example in actuality care about not going below the threshold, but the one drunk on optimization is incentivized to be at odds with keeping that cost center above it, let alone providing any cushion

The model many people here likely have for optimization is compile-time optimizations, but that's actually a weird class of special cases where you actually can prove you're not breaking anything by doing so. Most optimization looks more like strip-mining. It leaves the structures it touches barren and brittle

Most extant institutions have a desperate need to build better resistance to optimization-like objectives

I suspect but cannot prove that inconsistent metrics and incentives do actually work.

In other words, measure and reward different things each month! Latency this month, resource efficiency the next month, customer satisfaction the next, and so on…

Anyone attempting to cynically game the incentives will lose out on average, but people that naively do a good job overall will tend to be rewarded. Maybe not every month, but most months.

So we "negotiated" with management - let's do a half order now, and another half order in 6 months. The head of the department gleefully agreed and said that makes sense. This was spelled out in a deck that we went thru together, we had his buy in.

6 months later .. same guy - "why do you need servers again / you guys need to be more cost conscious / why can't you write more efficient code / you must be using the wrong architecture / etc".

And so we limped along on a partially refreshed estate.

I have worked for a company where the ethos among the workers was very high, but management was exceptionally incompetent at managing. Zero people skills, and deeply skeptical that people skills were even necessary. (Many companies founded by hackers are like this.) So the CEO and CTO asked people to do things, but did no process management at all and just waited for them to be done.

This worked a lot better than you would think. We had hired people who believed in our mission, and mostly people do want to do what's asked of them. Our codebase was pretty lean, even boring, because there was no incentive to do any promo packet type spectacular development.

Projects sometimes took a long time, but they did get done.

But this stops working when you have projects that require coordination between people with differing incentives. Teams grow tired of waiting for the other team to do their half, so mistrust begins to become endemic. In the vacuum, all your hacker ICs grow fatigued and start doing more "interesting" things just to amuse themselves, because, who's really watching them?

TLDR benign neglect, even under ideal conditions, will eventually be a problem. The company's progress becomes slower and slower, and may even start sliding backwards according to some metrics.

There is no "healthy laziness." This is a cynical term that does a disservice to leaders who skillfully practice with a light touch.

Say what you will about Russia but I do love their proverbs.

This is why mature products work so much better as open source- at some point you just want someone to care about the sharp edges instead of upselling new SKUs.

The article says it’s impossible to solve this problem. But I think the real problem is hierarchical organizations. They act as extractive institutions, removing value from people until those people realize what has become of them and then become parasites on the organizations.

The way out was provided by the framers of agile. I’m not talking about modern, consultant driven agile that uses the language of scrum to give organizations renewed extractive power. I’m talking the agile that provides value through close customer collaboration. That provides people inside the organization and outside the ability to influence each other. Closing the feedback loop eliminates disconnects and maps problems to solutions.

- the well run place seems too keen on micro managing. Estimating every step to the point of cancelling improvement is not 'well run'. I'm sure every book about advanced company management will tell you that.

- the badly run is hmm.. at least partially (if not totally) naive. What are the odds that people not being asked anything don't just talk all day long ? The most probable equilibrium point will be most employees doing a little bit of the mandatory duties in the morning, a little bit in the afternoon, separated by lengthy bits of smalltalk (not they kay kind). I have yet to see one person trying to fix anything in their environment because they had free time. 99% of them will just have a new topic to vent about in the coming coffee / smalltalk pause.

ps: anybody knows talks or books about people operating like emergency teams ? where the natural spirit is optimize everything until you reach hard limits ?

When someone asks me something like that, more likely phased like, “how quickly does this need to run”, “how fast does this page need to render”, etc., that’s the engineer I want to work with. Pair that with “how much of a benefit would there be if I get it to run faster” and you’ve got the makings of a superstar.

My experience:

Good engineering is about achieving organizational objectives, while understanding and managing tradeoffs.

People who aren’t asking questions of the above style, either fail to see the real-world purpose of their work, or they fail to accept that when doing even semi-competent work, the decisions they make tend to have both positive and negative consequences.

Without understanding those two things, it’s tough to be effective over the long term.

I've actually worked with this guy and the description is so perfect I wonder if it's literally the same guy.

Only in our case, the company was too incompetent to fire him and he ended up leaving claiming we were "bullying" him by reviewing his code and pointing out his mistakes!

I know of several groups that have the best of all worlds for a painful learning cost: apprenticeships. I know that the typical job growth of a apprentice involves doing your tasks, anticipating, then moving to management if you have the propensity toward that. The most intense desk jobs of the accounting world is the "big 4" which have 2 cycles: boom and consolidate/bust.

The boom cycle promotes the technical "senior" to the management position and requires the manager to review the work of the guy who just got promoted to senior. The manager becomes more concerned about roi over time and eventually goes into sales/estimating.

The consolidating cycle is where the fat is cut because it is "up or out" to maintain a pyramid structure. Those who get the boot often manage well (due to the high exposure) and are confident when starting a apprenticship business of their own (have technical and management and client service skills)

This pattern is similar for all apprenticeships I think like plumbers, cement masons, accountants, etc. The work product is well known, the skills are transferable, and correctness are easily observed by others with the skill.

The pain is when a manager takes tips from a "competent manager" as defined in the article who then has subordinates prioritize low roi activities like formatting or making it clean from sawdust before closing a wall up. Soon a roi-focused manager will look over the competent-manager's shoulder and say why is your team slow, and the answer is "they are slower than me (because they are being trained to look pretty) and i am telling them to work fast, maybe I need to tell them that they are low performing" and turnover increases until that manager stops training people as the manager isn't the client.

All though the article has an 100 percent correct description on how things can be in an organization, I do believe that what he describes is a badly run corporation, not a well run. I also believe that the way Semler reorganized his organization is an anomaly. It seldom works this way.

People, us all included, does not work well in cooperation when we are in large groups, without some sort of guidance. In corporations the most effecient guidance are incentives. That said, setting the right incentives and be able to adjust as you go is a very hard task. There is no "one solution" to how this is done, but if you succeed you usually reach your targets.

I am interested in the rest of this thought… “suppose you only get a standard raise unless you speak loudly”. Then do what?

What works better is introducing forms of competition, so that you might have different shops with overlapping, even duplicative responsibilities within the organization. This always appears wasteful to managers, but is the only way I've seen for change to occur in larger orgs.

As Adams noted, people really don't like competition as it forces them to work and innovate. They will go to great lengths to create a situation where they don't have to and can just coast.

Incompetent management is where the leadership sees management as a line of business vs a role. Places that operate that way tend to latch on to micromanage finance and accounting. When organizations operations or development teams are run by the CFO, only bad things can happen because the CFO’s incentives are not aligned.

I ran a large line of business for a big government agency during the pandemic and faced a similar issue. Government bureaucracy is not typically associated with visionary leadership. However, faced with this conundrum, I called the CEO equivalent and said “We need this.” (In so many words), and later that afternoon we were moving along with critical procurements.

Competent management has tight process controls to prevent waste. But the leadership is the head and the process the tail. If a VP (or whatever) is slave to some bean counter in accounting, that VP cannot achieve her mission. Leadership means we follow the process, but have the ability to act.

In smaller orgs, much less formality and lighter process makes more sense. You don’t want to be running romper room, but the processes required to run a global company like Exxon or JPMC is inappropriate for a startup.

A century of “we just need to care about this enough” not solving the problem explained in a blog post. Well done.

If competent management makes things worse, then it isn't really competent management. I'm not sure why introducing additional process is considered a sign of competence

Instead of setting arbitrary goals, couldn't they just pay attention to the things that people are actually working on and give out rewards/punishments based off of their own judgement? If you need to create some elaborate resource quota CI/CD system because you can't trust employees to do things decently, then it's a people problem

This reminded me of "The Gervais Principle: The Sociopaths, The Clueless, and the Losers".

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

Discussed here 15 (!) years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881296

@yosefk or anyone else- do you have suggested related reading?

This is basically every management fad.

What happens is this.

At a certain time the team delivered a perfect version. So perfect that nothing is needed to be refactored or added to it. It's done. Then the team immediately gets bored. In order to protect job security, the team invents new work for themselves, a huge architecture refactoring, that sort of things. Sure, why not, we have time and resource, reduce technical debt, etc.

A couple years go by and now the product is a rotten swollen mess with tons of useless verbose documentation, tons of integrations, a mind-boggling number of features and, of course, AI. And the product cannot even perform its original task because that was abstracted away a long ago.

Not gonna point fingers, because I'm gonna immediately get downvoted to hell. But we all know examples of that taking place.

This is a terrible definition, and the author proceeds to make their entire argument based off of specifically the shortcomings of this definition.

Any idiot can set an achievable objective and then achieve it. That's not competence, it is the bare minimum level of functionality to claim something is being managed. Having people dig a ditch and immediately fill it back in, over and over again, would be labelled as competent management under that definition.

Competent management identifies critical objectives and prioritizes resources such that they are accomplished adequately and efficiently.

If your goal is to get something done, then yes, obviously having more budget to do so would be better. But that's never the actual objective. The real objective is to advance the organization's goals - increase profit, raise capital, gain market share, avoid liability, what have you - which means making optimal use of finite resources.

> But wait, seriously though, what’s the math here? What are we maximizing? Revenue minus cost? Revenue divided by cost? I mean, shrinking the cost has got to be helping with these?.. Well, sure it’s helping, but it’s not helping you, because you don’t bring any revenue by yourself, unlike cost, which you very much do incur all by yourself. The math with you is, we tell you to do something if the cost is below a threshold. If you won’t commit to doing it cheaply enough, we’ll find someone who will, and if we can’t, we won’t do the thing, or reconsider the options in some other way. But exactly what the cost below the threshold is changes nothing in any math related to you, except for a lower cost making your job harder, since you have the same objectives to achieve. The firm’s bottom line - sure, lower costs help there. But the impact on the firm’s “revenue - cost” doesn’t trickle down to your “cost < threshold,” because you have no revenue.

This entire line of thinking is incompetent management all the way down. At the top level, they have either failed to recognize their critical objective (improving the revenue to cost relationship), or failed to allocate resources to accomplish it adequately and efficiently (setting up an incentive structure where middle managers can successfully deliver). The middle manager in this scenario is not even doing any management - the decision of what would be done and what resources would be allocated was made above them. This isn't a manager, this is a messenger assigned to communicate orders from on high to their peers. Perhaps they will get to make some lower level decisions over how exactly their team accomplishes the goals, which could yet be competent, but given that their goal is advancing their corporate fief it seems unlikely.

> What happens in a badly run place? In a badly run place, management is bad at setting objectives, so you have people aimlessly wandering about, lacking clear goals, and just doing stuff because they want to. They see an optimization opportunity and they gladly pursue it - it’s interesting, it’s fun, it’s good for the company, it’s what they’re here for... they don’t mind shrinking their resource footprint, because nobody monitors the resource budget properly, nor presses them to meet any targets very hard.

That's not a badly run place. That's just a place where people aren't being micromanaged. Top level leadership is supposed to give broad direction - are we more concerned with growth or cost reduction, for example - and make sure that there are enough people who are sufficiently motivated to make that happen. The specifics of how they can best accomplish those goals ought to be determined at that lower level either by the individual employees or, where collaboration is necessary, the team level. Incentives, targets, budget monitoring, these are all tools that management can use to solve problems, but it's not a failure when they are unnecessary, it is a mark of competence.

> Of course you could say that this is a badly run company, and to avoid arguing what that means, let’s stick to the definition of managerial competence as the ability to set and achieve objectives. Whatever objective you are expected to achieve, a bigger budget makes it easier.

Yes I would say this is a badly run company, and for some reason they just glossed over that. Probably he glosses over the "set" part of objectives and focuses only on achievement, when setting the right objectives is part of good management. Also bigger budgets don't make every objective easier to hit; it's certainly easier to make $1M of revenue with a $2M budget than a $500k budget but it's not necessarily easier to make a 20% profit.

Let's distinguish between two kinds of management and managers. There's high-level strategic stuff (ie should we deploy this proposed product line) and more operational stuff (which vendor should I pick). Likewise there are different kinds of objectives. A bigger budget will make some objectives easier, like a revenue target or a shipping date. But it won't make it easier to hit a certain profit margin or return on capital target [0]. For-profit companies should always be focusing on returns on investment. For government/non-profits the overall principle is to use money effectively; measuring that is harder but it's definitely not making Tom Everyworker feel good about his clean code. It's delivering value to somebody who doesn't work at the org.

If the senior management has set terrible objectives, and middle management achieves them effectively, then yes, bad things will happen. I would call this bad management; even if most of the managers are good the management overall is still bad. Bad middle managers might be better for the org overall in this case, if we assume workers are all angels who dream of nothing more than doing the "right thing", all agree on what that is somehow, and agree with the authors definition.

On the other hand, if senior management knows what they're doing, they'll set good objectives. It will involve profit not just revenue. It will involve delivering products/features customers want, not delivering things they don't care about, and doing so at a low price. If a division doesn't bring in profit directly (eg IT) they'll figure something else out which rewards good behavior and doesn't punish it. And then competent middle management will achive those goals effectively, and achieve the goals of the org. Note that making Tom happy and letting him ship as much code as he wants is at best only a small piece of those goals, so Tom might actually be unhappier in this scenario.

[0] Assuming there are no accounting shenanigans involved, which again, is part of good management.

Let's now turn to what one does about. I want to pick one issue to discuss here. Consider, this excerpt:

"Great idea - now I can commit some CPU or memory hog, then you can fix it, and we’ll split the reward."

Here and in other places the author implicitly refers to an underlying tolerance, existence, or undertone of lying, BS, and effete manipulation. In my time in corporate America I've not seen code like that, but I have heard, seen, and been at the brunt of similar actions:

- I manage up and down (a boss I once had said this) ... meaning ... I'm selling up and down the chain of command to put the spin on it I want. And if you're not doing this you're a naive moron.

- The same guy orchestrated work in our team that was sub-optimal (details unimportant here) precisely so his team would be involved, and have work in a larger project.

- The same guy, prior to me joining his team and unknown to me, went around the corp getting internal customers to use a particular service. What internal customers did not know, what that his intent was to make it a one way join: once the customer's code was integrated there was no practical way out. Besides job security, the ultimate aim was in his words "take over the floor by taking over the data."

- Internal service groups whose visions for what to do are what they want to do, and not what their ``customers" need. I've beat that into the ground in other posts. I will just say here: internal service groups MUST be customer driven just like they are on the outside. A roofer can tell me his vision, his price, what he wants to do etc.. I can agree or not. But ultimately I tell the roofer if he's value add or not, if his prices are too high or not, if his work is any good or not. And I will pay or not based on what I see. He doesn't tell me any of this. However, in corp america internal customer's don't have that agency because asshole internal supplies know management implicitly or explicitly will make customers use them.

- My better half works in cloud migrations. JFK the BS, games, lying that goes on to protect internal data centers is beyond even what I've been through. But I can say this: a leading reason companies move to the cloud? They are sick and tired of crappy internal servicing from those who run the private data centers. With-holding costs of labor, data floor space, or lying about it was common in her telling.

Where am I going? A good way to improve the climate at a company, which MUST BE DONE STARTING C-suite, then top management, the middle management, then TLs: BS, lying is fireable. As soon as people learn a company does not pay people to be cynical, that's already way better. I say starting at C-suit, because I learned the hard way substantive change will not happen unless it comes from on-high. See Ishikawa's tunnel analogy in "What Is Total Quality Control?: The Japanese Way." which is a focus on management's roles and responsibilities in quality.

Some examples you right read about where that's worked well: Berkshire Hathaway; Renaissance Tech. An old boss (a Chem-E) in Silicon Valley was a guy like this. These people don't like problems or mistakes ... making one is not a crime but not consequence free either ... but lying/BS always makes them worse, harder to find, and harder to correct.

I got the guy I mentioned earlier kicked our of our division. So I mean what I say.

Openness/truthfulness is a an critical intangible to good companies.