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this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2024
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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.
The people managers are identified as the ones that can control and discipline the workforce to maximize their exploitation.
Whether they're nice about it or they just really like their job as a slave driver doesn't really change what their job is. Their job is to be the enforcers for upper management and this grants them a different class position.
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.
I'm not opposed to hierarchical organizational structures?
Under capitalism, the job of every single manager is to extract as much surplus value from the workers as possible. That's their actual economic function. The problem isn't the organizational model, the problem is the larger economic system they exist within.
If you had some kind of horizontal non-hierarchical collective under capitalism all that could do is turn everyone inside of it into petite-managers and force them to exploit themselves in order to hit productivity quotas. Or, more likely, it would fail because people don't want to do that shit to themselves and need to be used and abused by a manager to make capitalism function.
K.
All I can say is that for many of us in people management here,
a) we could’ve paid our mortgage just as comparably on an IC track, and we do this job because we enjoy working with people and roadmap strategy, and
b) I don’t care whether you’re building a fintech bro trading app, public housing in the USSR, or are conducting an orchestra. You get enough people in one place trying to achieve a shared goal, and you need people to manage the people. Otherwise the work becomes messy and miserable.
You don't work with people, not really. You manage them. Your job is to strategically use them for maximum productivity; workers might be allowed some small amount of input but only as long as it can be fit within your "roadmap strategy". Your job it to discipline the workers and keep them on task. And, of course, make sure they never unionize.
These problems are structural. I don't care what your motivations are, your class position is as an underling enforcer for the boss and you're bourgeoisified by your position within the class structure. A manager, within this specific class structure, has every incentive to be an enemy of the workers. An individual manager can choose to become a class traitor, and people in management can be extremely powerful union organizers! But it rarely happens because it requires they betray their own class interests. It's structural.