Lawnmower Managers
Our huge mistake in tech was allowing lawnmower-managers to take over. It’s caused manager bloat, layers, and 1:1 overload. Let’s undo?
It’s not uncommon to see 5 layers of « servant leaders » before you find someone actually building your product or who’s immersed in the problem space.
So what happened? My guess is that we stopped treating people as adults.
We moved responsibility for careers, progress, human decisions mostly away from the individual. And created an entire career track of facilitators, aka lawnmowers. Over the years those managers atrophy all their domain skills, but multiply in your company. They have power, they take time away from others.
I started my career in the epoch before this was a thing. When I look back, it was some of the most rewarding work I’ve ever done and made strong friends. And the word 1:1 didn’t even exist. I learned the word 1:1 in 2010 (can you believe this!!).
Managers had 15-20 people, maybe more. But had lot of tech leads who lead areas of our product. I learned so much from our tech leads. The way they communicated, organized work, helped drive quality. We grew thru the work. Feedback was given from all directions where you liked it or not.
90% of the RnD company had code in production and was part of building, supporting, and making our customers and product better. We celebrated together, grew our families. I took a 9 month paternity leave.
This wasn’t startup slave working, it was a different culture to what we have now.
It wasn’t perfect, I’d get pissed at some of our roadmap decisions. Or why someone wasn’t pulling their weight. Or someone would call me out for that passive aggressive Bugzilla comment. But like adults, we worked thru it.
We’d have chats with our managers now and again, about work, life, and sometimes comp. But back then, we all got paid the same pretty much and if the company so did our comp.
There’s still value in being a great manager. You need them. But they should be in the work with the team, bringing either more experience or another perspective. Help develop the roadmap. It’s an important skill to develop.
But like parenting, there’s different cultures of managing, you don’t have to accept the current mainstream one. You can define your own.
Managing in this adult-accepting culture is a more rewarding job, and you can teach via the complex work that’s needed. You’ll have better managers for it.
This team stayed together for 10+ years. I don’t think anyone left until we got acquired by a mega-corp. VSCode was later founded and built by a group of people from this team, and many other great products. Smart, humble, good humans who grew up being treated like adults.
Give everyone leadership training, I definitely need it and helped me be a better adult. Then treat everyone like one and build your org and culture around that principle. You’ll grow as much or more from it, and you'll ship faster and better products.
Next: Time horizon friction