People managers

It’s easy to read something like The Case Against Project Managers and find it convincing:

I see this compartmentalization creeping further and further into tech companies, something that has been viscerally apparent as I have been looking for work lately. Historically I have had interstitial roles between organizations, but the current hiring landscape is asking me to pick a category to slot myself into.

As we apply Taylor’s principles to job roles and responsibilities, it is unsurprising that the workers comfortably settle in to focusing on their assigned tasks, without much critical thought applied to whether or not the task should exist. I was asked in a job interview if I would want to attend planning meetings about a feature I’d be building, or if I’d rather just have tickets assigned me. It blows my mind that people would choose the latter.

But reality is a bit different. Unless you’re making an out of the box WordPress site for a local business, the days of a single person being the copywriter, designer, frontender, backender, and everything else are long past.

In every real-life case where I’ve seen a highly-opinionated developer want to do everything, the results have been less than stellar. There are accessibility requirements, localization, the navigation needs to scale inside a bigger website with dozens of other options. That’s not even touching the tech side of things. Good luck getting professionals, split across multiple teams, to synchronize and prioritize together without some sort of project management.

I sympathize with the feelings in the original post. I really do. I consider how even stitching together a simple website is becoming too complex. A few years ago I would have said I was pretty good with CSS. I see new fangled stuff like this @property demo, and I literally have no clue what’s going on. It’s gibberish to me, and I can’t even work my way backwards to figure it out.

But that’s life. Technology always grows more complex. The emergence of administrators and bureaucrats has been a trend since at least the dawn of agriculture. I don’t see much point in shouting at the wind over it.

There are more practical approaches. While I’m leery of DHH’s self-promotion, 37 Signals having no full-time managers is an interesting idea. Throughout my career, the best managers and mentors I’ve had have been practitioners with light management duties.

Like most things in life, there’s a happy medium between a sort of anarchist mantra of we don’t need any managers and the absurdity of babysitter type managers at a nearly 1:1 ratio to workers in some companies.