After getting kicked in the teeth by Apple, punched in the gut by Tiktok, and stock falling 60% from all time high, Zucc finally realizes that thousands of directors, senior directors, VPs, senior VPs, presidents, and C-suites don't actually do shit and all the work comes from the lowest levels of employees
Too bad all the Meta coders are wannabe capitalists themselves and look down on other working class people, including even their own
Oh no, not like, finanically, like...systematically? Like managers managing managers is basically what happens to hierarchies after a certain size. It's sort of an immutable fact.
Now sure, Facebook probably has a lot of bloat, no question. But I'm guessing he stays on top and doesn't abolish his own position to re-form facebook into some kind of anarchist collective. So there's a develeoper, and he has a manager, and that guy answers directly to Zuckerberg? Like all the other departments?
Zuckerberg is probably trying to do an anti-corruption purge of sorts to get rid of managers doing empire building
In every big company I've been in, there have been managers on the 5-8th level from the bottom that have literally <4 direct reports. But they're "responsible" for hundreds-thousands of people which looks great on their resume
Get rid of all these managers with <10-15 direct reports and you can probably chop off a whole 2-3 layers of management
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Working at a large company and on a team that does a lot of cross functional projects, the directive is constantly to get to “the single source of truth” while battling every director group that has demarcated its territory even if duplicative.
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100% even a cursory look at the last 10-15 years show that the pendulum has oscillated substantially but being such a large firm, each functional group often has a lot of autonomy because of operational needs.
Increases in capital investment lead to expanding org structures which are more difficult to shed once demand contracts.
He is king, departments become fiefs run by a lord and their house. Fiefs must all compete with other fiefs for favour of the king. If fiefs successfully destroy another fief then so be it that's just market competition of the workplace coming to its conclusion.
I heard this worked out great at Sears!
I used to go to a dentist in a sears. What a place
This might actually salvage the brands of big tech companies that have become infamous for cancelling all their side projects. I wouldn't become invested in another Google 20% project knowing it'll last a few years at the most, but what if the reigning middle manager thought they were going to pass Google™️ OnlyFans™️ SEO Acceleration Platform®️ and its associated estates and retinue to their most contemptible failson? That's a product I can invest in.
The thought of departments within companies becoming hereditary property of their lords is honestly fucking terrifying.
Yes, but also a great setting for a novel!
Then lets get to it :so-true:
The incentive structure of middle-management causes them to want to create more layers of management between themselves, so I'm sure there's plenty that can be removed.
Typically a line manager has 5-12 reports (average 7), and the CEO has a similar number of C-suite or VP positions under them. If every layer had 7 reports, that's 6 layers for a company Facebook's size. But real companies have many more layers of management, because towards the middle of the hierarchy the typical report count becomes, like, 2-3.
Forcing middle management to keep a more constant number of reports would cut the size of the organization down quite a lot. But these decisions are actually executed by middle management, who do not actually want to do this. Middle managers prefer having as many people under them as possible, as this improves their standing when going up for promotion and salary increases. The people who succeed in entering middle management are people who are motivated by such things, and good at achieving them in this environment.
You'll find the same pattern in government jobs and military positions too, by the way. It's a natural flaw of tree-shaped hierarchies.
At my company some directors only have 2-3 direct reports if they’re closer in the hierarchy to the CFO which is where a lot of bloat seems to be. They’re like courtiers.
What tends to happen though is you get managers way in excess of the actual number of managers you need. Those people with no useful work to be doing busy themselves with causing problems
You get a couple layers of managers, and then if your company is flush with cash, those managers are gonna want to delegate their work to new manager positions. Before too long you're too bloated to be able to tell which positions are actually necessary cause the work is spread across so many people.
generally you get the highly paid important managers and the managers who actually do needed work and these are two separate groups