Drowning In Middle Management - Is There A Way Out?
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- Опубликовано: 20 май 2024
- Historically, FAANG companies have been some of the most engineering-forward companies in the world. In fact, back in the early 2000s, Larry Page actually fired all project managers at Google because he despised middle management. But since then, these companies have been taken over by middle management. Companies like Google and Facebook now have 8-10 layers of management between entry-level managers and the CEO. Not to mention, this hierarchy carries over into individual contributor roles as well which now have several levels of hierarchy. The only companies that have avoided this trap are Apple and Nvidia, and they’re the only big tech companies that have been able to avoid layoffs. These companies are finally starting to realize this friction though and are eliminating entire tiers of management. This video explains how big tech got overtaken by middle management and the future of leadership at big tech.
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Timestamps:
0:00 - Middle Management
3:02 - The Rise Of Product Managers
6:07 - Middle Management Takes Over
8:54 - Escaping Middle Management
Resources:
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10:00 As someone who works currently at Apple, I think your exagerating Apple layers. It’s WAY more flat. I’m a software engineer, and I only have 3 manager before reaching Craig. One Manager. One Directory. One VP. And it’s craig.
Oh wow, even more impressive haha :)
no wonder apple works
This is why I respect Larry Page, even if his ability as a CEO was mixed. He understood the dangers of middle management bloat and bureaucracy.
@@AAXERICH Apparently after ChatGPT started booming, both Page and Brin have come back somewhat covertly since they were always pretty passionate about AI. Seems like Brin specifically had more direct contact with Gemini and the related products. It's less clear with Page, but what is known is that he's been around again.
Google needs a visionary like apple did before the iMac. Pichai is lifeless.
They are not indian but American citizen.then according to your logic amd and nvidia ceos are Chinese.@@AAXERICH
I have been a CFO at multiple private-equity backed tech companies and this video is spot on. Cannot count how many times I approve a new headcount req in a given function only to have a request from the new hire to hire a direct report for them to do the job we hired the first person to do. Eventually someone has to actually do work rather than managing someone who is managing someone who manages the person doing the work.
I don't see the allure. I love to mentor, but I do not enjoy "people managing," that is to say: approving days off, conducting 1:1's, assisting in professional development, reporting on department performance, endless meetings, et al.
This is all a part of being a line manager. Someone has to do it and if you don't want to, you should not become a line manager in the first place.
@@virtualalias
Bingo! You and me both. The boredom would end me.
Not to mention, it really isn't an essential role because you aren't actually doing anything except inferring with production. 😳
The problem is that most of these managers actually have no skills. Thus you need so many different managers.
True
I couldn't agree more with your comment. When these middlemen transition into entrepreneurship or even move to a small company, their ineptness shines. The fact that these middlemen make >$150k many times is a complete theft from their stockholders.
It’s to gobble up talent and high IQ engineers
The key to flatter hierarchies is more direct reports per manager. Though depending on the job tasks that can get unwieldy quickly; even professional military leaders don't supervise and evaluate more than like a dozen subordinates at a time.
Also having 50 directs is unattainable, basically you don't have time for any of them. Heck even 20 is a lot, if zou have a quick 30 minute catchup your work is just about catching up.
@@collan580 25-30 is perfectly attainable for a middle manager. Nobody needs a 30mins catch up with manager unless it's YE review or a major escalation. Managers anyway delegate most of thier work, even the reports and PPTs are also automated with AI in many tech firms.
A friend of mine told me that at one point there was more middle management than engineers in their team. Crazy. How can anyone run a business efficiently like this? Middle management is terrible regardless of sector or company. Worst part is most of these "higher" level managers don't even know the products they manage since there are so many layers.
Most of these hyper-capitalized companies are almost UBI for their workers. No one single person "needs" to do any real work.
At Twitter, there were approximately 10 managers and other paper shufflers for every engineer doing actual programming work.
The standard reply from the managers (even the lower level ones) is they don't need to know products because their job is "strategy", not products.
These engineers and their bosses seem to think working at a tech company is like working at a factory. Come in, write the code, do the job, ship the product. What they need to be organized like is a construction company with a maintenance division. And i think it's because other engineers in chemistry or mechanics or electrics end up working in factories designing physical products for the workers to make. They can keep working so long as the things they helped to make sell.
But building a website or an app is more like building a skyscraper. You need a lot of workers up front to build it, then you keep a fraction of them around to maintain it. Pivot to the next building/project. These companies should think of themselves more as construction companies than factories. At least in terms of their workforce and project rollout.
They do that already, many just lay everyone off not long after a project is done and then send it off to India to be maintained.
Idk about that, this seems like a recipe for failure. The generally smarter way to develop a new product is to start with a talented but small team, to have big aspirations while being conservative about how much to prioritize. As the product's initial versions are released, learn from it and adapt, if it turns out to perform adequately, hire more people accordingly and start aiming ever slightly higher. If you reach a point where that product has no more room to grow, that's ok, you got a functional mature team ready to build something else, provided, of course, that you didn't overhire. The cost in productivity from lay offs is massive, and it highlights stupidity in overhiring at the beginning, then the eventual added stupidity in laying off and losing all that team maturity that could be utilized in making sure that product remains relevant. This is why products in maintenance mode get replaced so easily by up and comers. They got complacent. IF a small immature team somewhere else is able to build a replacement to your product, so could you, with your mature workforce, if you have had a bit of foresight.
Not to mention it's morally dubious, getting others to build something for you only to lay them off when things start going downwards due to your own incompetency as manager.
We always say 'building software' and not 'manufacturing software'.
0:40 Google engineer here, this segment confuses the levels used in role titles for levels of management. It's standard to have a mix of SWE 2, SWE 3, and senior SWE all reporting to the same manager. The roles are simply used for comp reasons, and for assigning appropriate scope of projects. I'm currently a SWE 3, and I have 6 managers between me and Sundar Pichai (1 engineering manager, 3 directors, and 2 VPs).
Yeah. This guy is creating content on a topic he doesn’t understand.
So are you saying middle management is NOT a problem. The quantity of middle managers is NOT a problem, and the quality of their skills is excellent? Please elaborate.
@@faksibey8906 Not at all, I do think there are too many layers of management, and bureaucracy regularly slows my productivity. But still the point he was describing here about roles is just not accurate.
OK, so the video got the purpose of these management titles wrong, but does it correctly identify the problem?
I think he mentioned 10 layers of management, but do you think 6 is too much, or inevitable, given the huge size of the company. Perhaps such a management structure is arguably relatively flat overall?
But, the hierarchy is SWE 1 then 2 then 3 and then those 6 layers between you n Sundar. ie 9 levels between you n CEO.
Compaired to 6 in case of (5 mentioned in video + 1 between Federighi and Tim Cook)
Everyones looking for a way to hire someone else to do their job and thats how a company turns into a corporation. 😂
Hahaha
HR is the problem. They create so many requirements for each person that needs to be supervised that a single manager can't handle all the busywork.
I agree. Being responsible for development and tracking of development is a ton of work in itself. Wish we didn’t have to baby folks and just get the work done
The vanilla CEO of Google is a product manager. Can’t expect anything from him.
😂
So being a product manager is a bad thing?
I mean cheetahs are adorable for sure. PMs idk.
@@adorablecheetah2930
In my company, product managers have ZERO technical knowledge, I spend more time exploring them what I am doing to fix an issue than fixing the issue.
It takes 15 mins to fix the issue, I need 30 mins meeting to explore what I did to fix the issue, I am basically baby sitting product managers.
@@rulabula2259 this cheeta is a PM lol 😭
You missed an important point
Having more ranks means people get promoted more but don’t earn big increases because the bands are relatively close to each other. Staff stay motivated and company overall saves money
Hmmm, leads to a pretty convoluted matrix pretty quickly though
Nothing saps engagement like the chance of maybe getting a tiny meaningless promotion, source there are 40 layers above me destroying value
@@LogicallyAnsweredYeah, but the fact that so many bands exist doesn't mean there's a person in each band
A program manager 2 doesn't necessarily report to a PM3
Their direct boss could be a director
@@LogicallyAnsweredWhy are you assuming these distinctions are managerial when they could be for compensation reasons, which would actually increase transparency...?
So happy you made a video about this that isn't just complaints
🙏
Multiple employees doing the same thing could come in handy in continuing operations when employees retire, leave, or tragically die. Sometimes well-written notes are not enough to continue operations effectively.
Each of your videos are so imformative! Love them :)
Really glad to hear that man!
The historian C. Northcote Parkinson observed that the number of administrators employed at the Colonial Office increased as the size of the British Empire decreased. This social phenomenon, now known as Parkinson's Law, mandates that the ultimate purpose of bureaucracy is to perpetuate itself ad nauseum , and that this is the cumulative result of individual agents inside the system acting in their own rational self interest. The principal applies both the private sector and to governments. Google and other bloated big tech firms are examples of Parkinson's Law in action.
fact check: google didn’t create youtube, they bought it in 2006
I used to think that Google having an entire team dedicated to the commenting feature on Google Docs was just a joke. Yikes.
I worked in product management in Google for 7 years, the most demanding asprct of my job was cramming useless meetings in my calendar 😂😂😂
For 7 years, I was confused about my role, why so much importance was given to my role, etc.
While my fellow PM's decided to show their importance in order to climb the ladder, I mostly spent my time doodling, googling, & watching YT 😂😂😂
How does someone get a gig like that?
Nice work. Your video seems to mirror my observations of the tech boom during the great financial crisis through to now when I was adjacent to the industry. Way too many middle managers and hangers on. It was fun while it lasted for some. Hopefully people saved and invested those posh salaries.
Gmail actually still has important issues to be fixed. These companies lack truthful open critical thinking and discussions.
Just a note: the different kinds of software engineer are mainly for compensation purposes.
More senior engineers are roughly distinguished by their ability to solve problems in the long term ( juniors can solve the problem, but will have long term issues). Usually the more senior roles will do a direction + supervisory role for juniors to prevent long term issues. From what I know, this is seen as a chore, most engineers rather not have to manage people.
With the last rounds of layoffs the people that weren't being let go were the managers. The managers spend all their time looking for SWE's to let go. It's like turtles all the way down with the majority turtles standing on the back of the turtles/programmers that actually do the work, including QA, business analysis, support and production management. It's insane.
The Dilbert and Peter Principles never go away. No matter how hard companies try.
This mirrors my company, Directors, Sr. Directors and VP and SVP's levels. What do I know I am at the bottom of the totem pole
Having worked as an executive in several multinational companies, we never had so many layers of "management".
Yes, a "Product Manager" or "Brand Manager" is indeed a marketing position [ffs Google.]
Hell, idc what happens to these giant tech companies. They ARE the problem in 2024. Cheers from Australia.
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Great video with interesting facts
🙏
having a career path available to you is not a bad thing in and of itself - I work in a large company and what you described sounds exactly like our seniority levels - this is not management. a business analyst may have the opportunity to get promoted to senior analyst etc. and it's very good that this opportunity is available. this is totally different from the line management career path, which you may or may not want to pursue. before this system was in place there was essentially no opportunity for promotions/an expert career if you did not want to go into management.
Amazing read out of big tech giants structure. Thanks man
I have a philosophy that the more complex or complicated something is, the more likely something will break down and take everything with it.
You just need one wayward bolt and the plane can break up in flight. That's why bolts are only where they are needed.
I’m at a pretty lean tech company and we have 1 product manager for all the software development of a product (we have like 10). I can’t imagine having to deal with a whole org of just PMs each managing only a feature of the product. With just 1 person per product, we know exactly who to talk to when there’s a problem.
If they fire 90% of mid level management in my company we would be lot more productive.
For some reason in tech companies they pay more to m2 manager than an individual contributor, so for a person to grow they have to choose management path.
My friend explained to me real good.
If they create more managers then they can create a sr manager position (a manager gets promoted), if they create more sr manager positions then a director position is created (a sr manager gets to fill that position)
Basically if managers want to grow they need to create more layers of management.
But if an individual contributor is promoted from IC4 to IC5 it only benefits one person.
So they make it hard to promote from IC4 to IC5, easy to to get promoted to manager.
Good channel, intelligent content
Haury, I respectfully disagree. While I think generally there is management bloat, I do think some of these roles can serve key functions in building technology products. Example - Product Managers are very important in defining product roadmaps, in order to ensure that engineering hours are spent doing the highest ROI work. This involves talking to customers, other important stakeholders internally, etc which are crucial for successful product launches. This is work that CAN be done by the engineering team, but you get much more leverage out of an engineering team when they can focus their time on development.
Though, the optimal ratio of PM’s to Engineers is at least 1:10, if not 1:15 (depending on the product). Anything more is bloat
Excellent video
Funnily enough, it depends a lot for Apple. Software side, maybe true, or even less layers than what you show. But other areas, are way way deeper, with the distances to Tim reaching 10+.
Great video.
You’re mixing up org chart and role levels.
Product Managers and Program managers are not “middle management”. I think you’ve mixed up a lot here.
@Hari: I'd much appreciate if you do one on the org structure of major service providers like TCS, Infosys, Genpact, etc.
Thanks for the suggestion man
As pointed out by many commenters there appear to be several errors in this video, but also a few ridiculous claims, such as comparing the "efficiency" of Intel with Nvidia by using the ratio of their market cap to employee count... WTF?
I've noticed similar issues in other recent videos from this channel, which is making me suspicious of their veracity.
Isn't the structure with many layers like SW Engineer 1, SW engineer 2... Program Manager 2, Program manager 3 etc. just about salary and rewarding achievements and not about roles per se? I'm under the impression that e.g. SW Engineer 2 is not the boss of SW Engineer 1 and Program manager 3 is not the boss of Program manager 2.
You’re right, it’s more of a seniority thing than direct reports. But the point still stands that these companies have too many managers.
@@LogicallyAnsweredBased on what evidence?
When I work for myself and startups, I am the CEO, CTO, Lead Architect, Lead Developer, and Lead Sales. I do everything but Marketing and Accounting. When I try to work anywhere, they want to pigeon hole me into just a regular developer, greatly underutilizing my many talents.
"Hi Bob, Bob." Peter, Office Space
You're confusing salary grades with project structure. PM 1, 2 etc. are the experience, seniority of the employee. It doesn't mean that projects have 4 levels of PM.
In my experience, shallow hierarchies with an engineer-turned-manager on the top work best for tech. It is when a non-engineer finds their way into the hierarchy (thinking the position is high enough not to require any engineering experience), that it starts bloating. A non-engineer will try their best to place as many layers of indirection between themselves and the ground workers as possible (so they don't need to understand anything about engineering or being/working as an engineer).
The middle management then gets stuffed with people, who don't understand, what's really going on underneath them. And who are not quite good enough to move further up. This can be quite frustrating in a company, which has a good CEO and great engineers, yet they are separated from each other by a sea of mediocre bureaucrats and office politicians.
I think people seriously underrate the value of having multiple layers of Management at a large corporate organization. After all the opportunities it presents for betrayal and backstabbing in order to work your way up the hierarchy is virtually boundless.
I'm in the tech sector, the thing is this problem naturally arises as people (specially younger one) want to be promoted.
My previous job had:
Associate Software Engineer
Software Engineer 1
Software Engineer 2
Senior Software Engineer
Principal Software Engineer
And Principal had their own bunch of roles.
At the end of the day ALL roles did the same thing. You had even situations of SE 1, being the lead with Seniors.
This played 2 roles:
1. People are happy because "career progression", which everyone in their mother wants but its impossible for everyone to be the CEO.
2. This allowed the company to justify paying workers less. What? You are a lead, star engineer that does 90% of the work? Well you are only a SE1 so we can't pay you more than this range. Whenever you reach SE2 (it was time locked) we can discuss a raise.
So while I'm not saying I agree, I myself quit that company, there are business reasons why companies do this.
Having a good SWE ladder is a great way to mitigate this issue by letting skilled ICs be mostly ICs instead of going to management. I see Google do a good job here, and doubling down would create even more incentive to be flatter.
Management positions are BS roles that should be abolished.
A team lead or senior person can handle corporate nonsense and contribute to the actual work. 😳
TPMs at Meta/IG are not middle managers (they are not even managers period) there are ICs and don't manage anyone.
Wall Street beats Larry, and the Google founders seem to have given up on Google.
Since the PM became CEO, there hasn't been a single successful product.
He only has next quarter ROI and DEI on his mind.
I don't know what he's doing, but he's the highest paid CEO.
Most of the VP level and above are from PM.
Technical program management (TPM) is not managers, and they have nothing to do with product.
They are programmers working across multiple teams and projects. They job is ask questions, schedule meeting, and make notes. They are supposedly make collaboration better. Sometimes useful, sometimes not.
maybe in tech the issue is too many middle management but in a lot of other industries, especially many services, these positions have been mostly cut at the detriment of customers. you now have people at the bottom who are badly trained, a "manager" who got that title rather than a raise a bunch of people at HQ pushing operational guys to do more with less.... so maybe some managers are not needed but it is not necessarily in the middle that the issue lies
Ok, so I'm more than ok with my boss making more than me if they have 10-20 more reports than me. I would like to know from an Nvidia engineer if the flatness is motivating or if the employee/boss relationship is busted from the dilution of attention.
wow this video is 100% accurate.
Yes.
We can see gamification on full display here, as the corporate structure was effectively turned into an RPG game.
Comparing NVDIA & Intel is not fair.
Intel has fabs, NVDIA doesn’t manufacture processors.
I’m getting a serious case of deja vu from the video. Wasn’t this video out before?
Nah, but there was a similar thumbnail in the past
I thought the same thing
Viewing this video, I think Apple & Nvidia is incomparable to Google & Microsoft. The latter might have tens of thousands of features each. Apple at maximum has thousands of features in their OS, and Nvidia is engineering focused could be even less.
All these product managers and many google products don't even have basic feature support. e,g. Google Assistant is a completely ignored product that had so much more potential.
Is there a company that just fires or transitions all employees after they finish building the product?
I liked the focus on middle management but You probably do not understand “Product” “Program” or “ Engineering “
Sounds like you are exaggerating quite a bit. As long as engineer is in the title, you are still on one team level with lead as the manager. Then even the manager is a single title regardless of their seniority titles. That goes on so it is not a straightforward pyramid as you depict. These levels within a role are to retain your senior staff since each level has a salary cap.
😮true brother 😮
G's current Mgmt structure is so densely packed for zero reason, it does not help anything and just adds more people not doing the actual work.
Someday we will have CEO1, CEO2, Senior CEO etc and all of that will be AI.
12:16 "When it comes to Google, Microsoft and Amazon though..."
What about Intel? I was kind of hoping you'd opine about them too.
how did you find this idea
Was scrolling through levels.fyi lol
Software Developer does not report to Staff Software Developer, it is your evolution as an Individual Contributor. The video is a bit off.
finally somebody is saying this stupidity out loud!
I have this opinion where big tech companies are incentivized by governments to hire workers in order to diminish unemployment in this sector, hence the horizontal expansion of the last ten years to absorb new graduates and those were laid off. Take for instance Twitter when Musk announced cuts finding out there were far too many people in the company, or when META was announcing thousands of new jobs opening, where are you going to fit all these people?
Same with SDE
Capital One and Amazon completely did away with all TPM roles.
Distinguished engineers? What a title.😂
And that's when innovation dies, corporate politics kicks in and the company goes to shit. The minute you have more MBA's than engineers your tech company is done. I'm building my second tech company, (my first one, that was a rip roaring success until, yes, you got it, we got an unscrupulous MBA investor that trashed it playing dirty business games) and I will NOT allow this to happen again! Boeing syndrome.
i loath too much middle management. it speaks volumes to culture and bureaucracy.
no escape out!
Often the case
Regarding to 1.2B metavers project, the development of that project doesn't spend 1.2B.
But the shitcoin (Decentraland) that project is built for has market cap of 1.2B, they are different thing. :)
You just ignored product managers. I guess there aren't any corporations in your eyes that do Agile frameworks but hey we do exist and are directly below directors. Cheers!
I donlt think Dilbert would agree that things were simpler back then.
One company keeps buying out more companies but you can't then have one manager managing the extra 5 so you have to keep the original staff or hire new ones. If they stayed separate companies t would be simple. It only seems complicated because it all gets thrown under the same name bit none of these really are the same company or service at this point..
Madness. At least they're waking up.
My brother is a Senior Manager in IT programs and he doesn't think he will ever get laid off.
Must be an important role in his case
Who made this thumbnail my guy 💀💀
Hahaha, yours truly
Intel banked too long on x86
Hi Hari, I have been try to communicate to you that there is a channel plagiarizing your hard work. They have copied at least 3 of your videos.
Ah, really appreciate your concern man. If you’re referring to Einfach Erklart, Logiciamente Aclarado, or Logikal, don’t worry. Those are official translated channels :)
@@LogicallyAnswered It’s not any of those channels unfortunately. It’s called Journey2Wealth. I was going to watch your video “98.9% Saturation, now what” and they popped up too with the same thumbnail. I watched the first 10 seconds and it was your same script verbatim! I ended up find two more videos, same thumbnails, same script. I think they are trying to mine their channel using your material as their own.
it isn't about managers. it was about timing. there is no difference that 7 layers of management would make than 40😡😡
Its called Job farming they hired a lot of people so that it could look like they are growing to investors and this gets the stock up
A sde can manage people but a manager can't write code.
People who do nothing but manage just make things more complicated unnecessarily
AI is the new multi manger
While I do agree with part of the sentiment of the video and some information is accurate. Your representation of levels is misleading. Levels do not mean that there are so many people on top.
It is just a title to be able to justify paying some people more than others and how much more it is expected from them.
Long as they still need UI/UX Designers...
The most important employees to fire in any company are the DEI and ESG people.
Comparing Meta's Horizon worlds to a Wii Game, is an insult to Wii games.
Are they really just so rich a bored that they are creating problems then making jobs to fix it
(Then laying them off)
I mean you say that the younger companies are gonna take over and its not that i disagree i just think that said small companies are gonna be owned by the big ones mentioned when they do so theyll still get their money lol
ohh god my job is in danger. !!
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