Are you a manager or an aspiring manager at a medium-to-large technology corporation? Or a “manager of managers”?
Here is the dark truth that no one is telling you: The role of the manager as we know it, is going extinct - we are at the beginning of the end.
There is slow but sure seismic shift underway to remove “layering” and “overheads”. What started at Meta as the “Year of Efficiency” is likely to expand to other companies and become the new normal in the post-ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy) era Silicon Valley.
As it stands today, the “skills” and “activities” a manager needs to learn, perform, get ahead and grow in their career revolves around:
🔂 Daily Stand-ups, Weekly 1-on-1/Skip-level meetings, Weekly TPS Report, etc.
🗓️ Monthly Operations/Headcount Review
☸️ Quarterly Finance/Business/Technology/OKR Review
📆 Annual OKR/Budget/Compensation Planning
📅 5 Year Strategy/Roadmap
🤷🏾♂️ Performance Review, Performance Rating, Calibration, Stack Ranking, etc.
Wait, how can you say that 1-on-1s are not necessary? Isn’t it a “best practice”?
Well, it is not just me, but listen to Jenson Huang, the CEO of NVidia. He discourages it even today! He doesn’t do any 1-on-1s and has 60 direct reports… Imagine how much “layering” gets removed in such a setup. Listen to him explain this:
After 23 years of experience in Tech in various levels of management, I’m here to not only warn you that the clock is ticking but also help you to survive and thrive this massive shift in paradigm.
In this post, I will try to explain what’s happening and also give you some actionable guidance and next steps along with the two big opportunities in front of you in the years ahead.
If I were a betting man, I’d say that aspiring managers have a better shot at this than current managers. The primary reason is that this involves unlearning, which is hard for many for us. As John Kenneth Galbraith put it:
Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.
Table of Contents
What is happening and why?
The promise of technology was to improve our productivity and give us more free time. However, the irony is that technology companies are struggling to solve their productivity problems and end up working long hours - poor work-life balance, burnout, quiet quitting, rest-and-vest, etc.
The obsession about improving productivity and innovation is a long story - from Waterfall, Agile, SAFe, LeSS, Scrum, “Spotify” Model, etc. But, the internal chaos, pain and the inability to get stuff done won’t be found in press releases externally but is known to every CXO deep down in their heart.
There is a fundamental mismatch between the nature of modern knowledge work and the organization of it. The mistakes and category errors of mainstream management practices are wide and deep.
👫 Fundamental misunderstanding of human nature: Theory X vs Theory Y
🥷 Command-and-Control vs Decentralization
🌀 Seeking Certainty vs Embracing Complexity
🚫 Purely Reductionistic vs Systemic Thinking
✅ Blind Chasing of Efficiency vs Effectiveness
🗒️ Too much focus on Planning vs Preparation
🥅 Management by Objectives vs Management by Means
📈 Chasing Growth vs Development
🔢 Quantification Bias
and more
We are truly in a “Emperor has no clothes!” moment. Lemme explain…
Do we know what these words mean?
The first principle that underpins DevOps is Systems Thinking.
How many of your past or current managers & executives can you learn about “Systems Thinking” and how it is being applied in your organization?
Do the existing power structures even allow you to ask this question to executives?
The language of “systems” has been on papers for sure… But, how many can truly explain and act according to what this sentence says in the Netflix Culture document:
“You look beyond symptoms to identify systemic issues.”
How about LinkedIn’s Culture and Values:
“prioritizing the whole over any part”
In 2019, the CEOs of many of America’s largest public companies signed a Business Roundtable statement that “redefines the purpose of a corporation,” saying that they “share a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders,” not just shareholders. 181 CEOs committed to lead their companies for the benefit of all stakeholders – customers, employees, suppliers, communities and shareholders.
If so, is it OK to layoff your employees if the profit for shareholders goes down during a recession? It takes systemic thinking to strike the right balance, which is sorely lacking in mainstream management.
Even if you can “ChatGPT” (is it a verb yet 😉) what ‘systems thinking is’, do you or your managers know how to apply it to software development? Do your executives view the corporation as a complex system?
For most organizations, the answer is a big NO! As Harrington Emerson elegantly put it,
As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.
We are all caught up in methods like DevOps without truly thinking from first principles to understand what we are doing and why!
The smoke before the fire!
When a major economic shift like the end of ZIRP happens, one must take cues from what Founder led companies are doing…
Mark Zuckerberg started his “Year of efficiency” layoffs at Meta last year and removed management “layers” at the company - this will likely be the new normal going forward.
Bayer is currently “Getting rid of bosses” - the experiment has over 100,000 employees self-organizing themselves.
AirBnb’s Brian Chesky got rid of classic product managers.
While it is difficult to ascertain, some reports suggest that manager-level or higher made up almost half of all observed layoffs in 2023
While I don’t condone any of them, these early trends may spread far and wide due to social copying.
The elephant in the room
X (formerly known as Twitter) is the Elephant in the room.
Executives I chat with are curious to learn how Elon Musk (yes, even the ones that hate him) pulled off the massive Twitter layoff (> 75%) and yet the social media serivce is still functioning well and more importantly is shipping new features at a rapid pace. How is Musk able to achieve rapid pace of innovation across all of this companies - Tesla, Space X, Neuralink and now X?
Elon is even publicly mocking Boeing for their failures:
Why is it that successful corporations, as they get bigger & bigger, become slower and slower over time? Innovation drops or disappears, quality and security takes a beating, the numbers from developer "happiness" surveys may be good but it gets frustratingly hard to get anything done, there is always too much coordination headwind and so on.
Reorganizations after reorganizations, transformation & change management initiatives, centralization and decentralization yo-yos, change of leaders, mergers and acquisitions to drive up revenue, cost cutting & layoffs in high-cost locations as profits erode, creative accounting practices, outsourcing of thinking by hiring "management" consultants, etc. and yet the problems continue to persist year after year.
This accumulating pressure over the years coupled with tight post-ZIRP economic conditions means that some executives may try to go to the extreme to be successful in what they seek. How much overall “fat” is Silicon Valley Corporations carrying?
So, what do I do now?
In my first premium post, I will share
What to know/learn instead?: The new knowledge and skills you must to learn to survive and thrive in the emerging world order.
How to put this to practice?: How to test and experiment with the newfound knowledge/skills even in your current role?
What are the two major opportunities?: Discuss the two major opportunities that exist for people who are looking to transform away from becoming a traditional “manager”.
The Cyb3rSyn Newsletter is primarily focussed on imparting these ideas and skills to help build the next generation of technology leaders and entrepreneurs. We will deep-dive on many of these ideas and more in future posts.
You can subscribe to the Cyb3rSyn Premium Tier (I’m Serious) and get actionable guidance on the next generation of management delivered directly to your inbox. You can also read the premium posts on this website where you can interact with me and other members via comments, surveys, etc.
Let’s dive in!