Thread regarding IBM layoffs

@Sysyguy that was beautiful. So accurate it hurts

So WFH identifies useless people. No wonder IBM execs shut it down!

@duh+15tDvsHW Excellent post. I'll add one more dysfunction to that. Over time, markets change, products come and go, mergers and acquisitions happen, but organizational inertia remains and you end up with Directors with no direct reports reporting to other Directors, VPs with no or maybe 1 or 2 direct reports reporting to other VPs. Spans of control decrease while layers increase. The ideal pyramid structure you describe above actually inverts. There are the same number of or maybe more "managers" than individual contributors. Soon this gets justified as a "hyper-matrixed organizational structure". But it is toxic and unsustainable. Yet it often takes a crisis to fix it.

TL;DR: Big companies spend a lot of time "coordinating" things that produce no value from being "coordinated".

One of the fundamental problems with large companies - and doubly so for large, old companies - is the "hierarchy problem", aka the "command and control" mentality. Suppose you have 10 engineers or sellers or marketers or information authors or whatever other productive people make up your company. You're going to need a manager for them. And that first-level manager is (usually) doing useful things: providing career guidance, steering professional development and promotion, resolving disputes, coordinating activity between team members, coordinating with other FLMs, setting priorities and strategic goals that provide guidance to the individual team...

So even though that FLM may not write code or docs or tests themselves, they do add value. Like the cox in a rowing eight, or the coach on a sports team, you're better off with them than without, so you accept the 10% overhead. [You can quibble about the exact ratio. Somewhere around 10% is common in the US; and there is reason to believe that 12+1 is the ideal number...]

That's great for a small company or project, but what about a larger ones? Well, maybe you need a second layer of management, i.e. Directors. They act as "FLMs to the FLMs" and coordinate across teams that need to cooperate - this is particularly important when individual teams of 10+ are not and cannot be entirely independent. My own product does that and our dev director is extremely valuable. Of course, you're now paying a higher "tax": if you have 10 FLMs under the director, instead of 10+1 your ratio is now 100+11, but OK. It's worth it to have 100 developers moving in the same direction.

And in my opinion... that's the limit of diminishing returns. You put a VP over 5 directors and now you have something very different: you have 5 or 10 distinct products - or at best, very loosely related products - under one VP.

This is the critical point at which the management is not merely useless but actually TURNS NEGATIVE. Those managers are not merely not adding value, they are SUBTRACTING value from everybody else, in several ways. There are the obvious time sinks like status reports and operational reports and strategy reviews and so many other "read only" meetings (i.e. you go in with a deck and come out with no useful additional direction). And you spend 80% of the meeting listening to 4 other directors whose deck you don't care about. But there are more insidious things like "aligning the products strategically" even where that doesn't make any sense: "Everybody must support technical standard XYZ" or "integrate with product ABC". And so often, that is not done until everybody is done, which means all the products move at the pace of the slowest product. And in the worst cases, VPs start creating busy work to justify their existence: that's when you get directives like "everybody must present their status using this new common template"...

And then finally, you get the worst of all: "VPs without portfolio". At some point, the company starts to sprout "cross-functional responsibilities" like "VP of cloud strategy" or "VP of program management" that span multiple products – even when there is no real commonality of need; or what little there is could easily be arranged one-on-one between the respective product managers. But the biggest danger of these people is that THEY HAVE NO SKIN IN THE GAME. An offering manager might say "it seems like supporting Azure would be valuable, but what do I have to cut out of the roadmap to make room for it?" and then makes a business decison. But the VP of cloud strategy will say "Everybody must support Azure", and there are no consequences for them, because they only care about cloud strategy. It costs them nothing for the OM to add Azure, regardless of what else has to be cut.

And of course there are 7 more of these people - some of them have job titles like "CTO's office" or "major partner relations" or "architectural committee" but they are all flawed in the same way - each demanding their own slice of the pizza. And before you know it, they've eaten all the pizza.