I'm going to make the observation that politics in a company is caused by management. The more "politics" you have at a company, the more you pay in a "political tax". Effort which should benefit the company is delayed or made harder as employees have to bob and weave to get through the politics.

I do believe if you want real culture change in a company, the best way to do it is to show managers the door, because that's how you got there in the first place.

Edited to add:

I'm not saying get rid of management. I'm saying get rid of bad management. And if your bad management is a malignant tumor, well, it's too late to fix it manager by manager.

(Context: I’m an IC and told my Manager multiple times that I’d quit if they ever make me a manager)

If you truly believe that, please do yourself a favor and read “The tyranny of structurelessness” to understand what a managerless place becomes. everyone and no one becomes a manager, and there’s no explicit avenue of recourse. There’s a good reason management arises. We can discuss good management vs bad management, but pretty fundamentally there’s no such thing as “no management”.

I read OP as change the management to change the culture, not remove it.

I think this is a simplistic take. In companies where there are clear management structures there are clear and obvious ways for managers to fuck around and play politics. When there aren't clear management chains, people with probably similar characteristics fuck around in different ways - it's just less obvious to some people.

Management is a tool used by people with their own motivations to acheive their goals. But a lack of management lets those same people acheive those same goals in different ways. Whether that's starting up duplicate projects and products, causing chaos and confusion by inserting themselves into topics that don't concern them, or simply picking fights. The same people get along in any organisation, the tool of management is just the easiest to spot from below.

The most egregious office politics I've ever experienced came from the company that had a pathological aversion to managers.

They aimed for minimizing managerial positions to an extreme. The result was that a lot of ICs were playing hardball politics with nobody to keep them in check.

Really opened my eyes to the reality of office politics.

The tricky part is who are you showing the door. My experience is that layoffs is a highly political event as well, and the "most political" managers are the one who stay. Which is natural, as they are the ones who leadership has more visibility to. That team-player, hands-on manager, is worth nothing if (s)he didn't play the politics game. So the company might be worse after this.

Deming agreed with you: Quality control is a management problem. But there's management and there's management. If we're talking about 14000 people, they're not the top managers of the business, and getting rid of them won't change the culture.

They're workers, and Deming also said: Don't blame the workers.

Middle management _is_ the culture of a company. A regular worker interacts not at all with the CxOs except reading their emails and every day with their managers.

Middle management is also the memory of the company.

Nah, they're both downstream of complexity. Complexity creates both managers and politics. But managers do create more complexity and more politics.

The problem in companies like this is there are often few incentives for reducing complexity, even in a company like Amazon that claims to value eliminating it.

So they finally figured out most managers are not just useless, but literally a drag to the company and progress?

The managers are just following the (fairly absurd imo), amazon internal processes for the most part. If the processes don't change, there are just going to be a bunch of overloaded managers. The current processes, culture, and 'principles'/dogmas are inefficient, contradictory and toxic af.

Yeah the existing managers left behind will probably be overloaded, because one person cannot scale over so many direct reports. So then perhaps Amazon has figured out how to scale middle managers so they can effectively manage multiples more. Perhaps an AI/ML tool of some kind, which would seem kinda dystopian, but might not be awful... who knows, this is just wild speculation.

that's the definition of an incompetent / mediocre manager. Most organizations expect their employees and managers in poarticular to be "breaking doors", which is the opposite attitude to blindly following any internal process.

Who created the policies and procedures?

Bezos.

I'm interested to hear what type of structure you prefer over one that has managers overseeing developers.

Or are you saying you just need to find the good managers? I might have misunderstood.

I'm honestly interested in alternatives.

In my experience, the worst of them are lodged in there tighter than trichinella larvae.

A manager decides to spend their energy managing their relationships up, down or sideways. The very worst will focus solely on managing the upwards relationship, but that's precisely what makes them hard to dislodge: Every second of their day is spent on efforts that helped their job security by relationship building.

So it's not just that the best manager is also the best at finding a new job, but that every second they spend improving their org's performance is a second they don't spend trying to fool a typically not-so-good middle manager into thinking they are indispensable.

This is also why, every time I've seen manager culls, I have found that it was rare for upper management's idea of who was easier to replace was to match that of peers and reports. The ability of the bad manager to hide the truth from the exec is much stronger than people realize.

Yeah because the good ones already left the shitshow to get a job somewhere better. Because they can.

This is true. I've also found that there are perverse incentives when it comes to (especially upper) management. Building up enough political clout in your organization that aren't answerable to many people, and managing your image among the few you are answerable to, is the best skill one can have if the outcome is steady long term employment. Providing value to your company and coworkers doesn't correlate as much with surviving corporate haircuts like these.

The best are always the first to leave

Their upper managers don't want "best", they want loyal, they want yes men that will make perfect henchmen, that's what best is for them so they get exactly what they're looking for. People who rock the boat aren't gonna cut it.

No now just senior managers are supposed to pickup the slack and drag the company behind on there own. and also program managers & useless product managers.

jokes apart, long ago when I was there, once somebody did the internal org site scraping and found out in our org there were almost 6 workers (status givers) to 1 status takers. and sr. engineers are supposed to 'manage themselves', so really full of political BSers.

Don't forget principals. Most of them do nothing the whole day and are compensated to create BS projects that go nowhere.

Haha a friend was just recommending I apply for a job there. I told her hell no. It's one of the worst in big tech. Probably second worst after twitter.

The next one she came up with was Microsoft lol. I work with them a lot and I hate it.

I work for an enterprise now but a pretty decent European one. I don't think I could work for a US big tech company.

Expanding on this, even a little, would make your comment much more interesting.

What's a decent european enterprise?

They’ll just hire more managers again in 18months

Even if they do, they've culled those that they deemed weren't a good fit. If the criteria is rational, purging can be very good for an org, and the employees. Crap managers make jobs suck.

I am curious how do you just hire 14,000 managers at the cost of $3.5B yearly more than you needed?

Maybe they should fire the guy responsible for THAT.

Also some finance guy gets rewarded for making that much cost savings, and they have meat to give to the shareholders, it’s an endless cycle. The finance folks only get the gain, the revenue/quality loss of their actions will not be measured accurately and will not be traced back to their actions. Only upsides.

Just a few weeks ago I was contacted by Amazon recruiter and refused for exactly this reason. I expect more layoffs as they figure out they don't need this many engineers after all. They will turn into money pumping google search analog.

From a surface level it seems like they've operated like this since... forever. AWS is still a very nice product, at least for the use cases I have for it. I have a hard time reconciling those two things.

Amazon (the online retailer nowadays mostly hawking Chinese insanely-named brands) and/or AWS the cloud service behemoth?

I continue to find it so bizarre that they are the same company.

Most managers are human ticket classifiers.

There's a lot of truth in this. We haven't figured out how to automate complex systems. Instead, systems operate under partial automation, and exceptions are handled by humans. This is also true of any bureaucracy. Because automation is invisible and humans are visible, it will always appear that bureaucrats are spending most of their time taking care of the failures of unnecessarily complex systems.

The engineers working on complex technology systems are doing a lot of the same kind of things. Technology is disturbingly similar to bureaucracy.

Consider the many HN threads to the effect of " just deleted my account for no reason and there's no escalation process or human to contact." Now imagine of Social Security ran that way. Health care does, to some extent.

I would have also thought this an insult, until joining a company where nobody was classifying the tickets.

> human ticket classifiers

Are there alternatives? I ask this as someone who spends a lot of time doing just this. Your addition of the word "human" gave me hope there is a better/alternative system?

This is weird blogspam based on a Business Insider article from October of last year, which was based on a quote from Amazon's CEO in September of last year: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-could-cut-managers-sa...

TL;DR:

> CEO Andy Jassy said last month that he wanted to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of the first quarter of 2025.

It appears the rest is speculation and hypothesizing from analysts, which is why they're quoting Morgan Stanley as a source.

Padme meme: by hiring more ICs, right?

If you do the maths, the average manager receives 250k a year in benefits.

Who lays off the engineers now?

The teary-eyed CEO, of course.

This is old news and refers to the 15% figure that was announced last year (more than 6 months ago!) and for which the "layoffs" are already completed.

Overall, nothing at all happened, managers looked after their own kind and the worst that happened for some was having to go back to IC positions.

The article is most likely AI generated since it says this was announced "last month" and the article is from March, but the real announcement was September 2024:

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/ceo-andy-jassy...

1. Amazon announces new IC to Manager ratio target. Meeting this target would mean an overall reduction in the number of managers.

2. Someone at Morgan Stanley assumes that lay offs will be the mechanism used to reach the target ratio and does some math that says this'll save $XX billion, based on the number of employees at Amazon and the average manager salary.

3. Business Insider reports on the Morgan Stanley memo.

4. This trash article re-reports on it for some reason.

In reality, teams were re-org'd, managers became ICs. Maybe some were PIP'd. No large layoffs though.

They probably just "promoted" people under them and then immediately fired these people for "poor performance". It is an old scheme they have.

No, they did not. Managerial positions are not a promotion in Amazon, they're just a lateral move, and the process takes around 6 months...

They did exactly what I said they did, moving some managers to IC in the very worst case but mostly shuffling teams around.

How do the cost savings work then?

That's a made up figure from the journalist. They estimated that managers each earn between 200-350K and came to that number.

#shareholder-value

With the rise of AI, my disdain for managers has gone up. I don't think it's because AI has made managers redundant. It's because AI is making me redundant and I'm realizing they've kind of _always_ been redundant.

I've heard that the managers there aren't nearly as big a problem as the incentive structures that are imposed on managers. The competitiveness within the ranks compromises the office culture. This was explained to me as the origin of the plague of PIPs.

I imagine one thread of the logic is like dang, AI is only producing mediocre work this year. What can we replace where mediocrity is acceptable... How about a role whose primary function is interhuman language.. where we can fallback on the humans involved (engineers, c levels) naturally catching and correcting mistakes?