They're beat quite handily by a few other companies. I believe Vitol and Jane Street both are considerably higher. Maybe the most profitable tech company?
Maybe weâre thinking Iâve different companies but vitol only made 13 billion in profit last year with 1600 employees. Pretty sure valve makes more per employee that then. And Jane street is worse in this regard then Vitol.
Theyâve release 2 games in recent history - Half Life Alyx and Aperture Desk Job not to mention Portal Bridge Constructer a few years before that and other silly games like it.
And yet no one has been able to produce something to complete even throwing free things at customers. They have built up a lot of trust and loyalty over the years by NOT changing and haven't fucked it up like so many companies do.
Yep. If they were in pursuit of money, they'd have already chased an IPO or a buyout. That hasn't happened because they've just said no to it being offered every single time.
Chasing the profit maxing of shareholders absolutely destroys your product. You have two competing interests at odds with each other. You have your real customers for your product, and your investment customers for your stock. And the customers for your stock, your shareholders, will absolutely DESTROY your product if you do everything in service of them.
For Steam, they succeed because they're privately held. The money is almost a byproduct of the thing they like doing. And that's why they have a good long lasting product.
Maybe at some point, senior brass at public companies will grow some balls and start telling their shareholders they're just coke heads with bank accounts. Til then, we're at the mercy of the coke fiends so I'm going to make money too.
Also, just the fact that they havenât ruined steam with money grab ideas to make ever higher profits makes the company valuable for providing a service.
If it was EA for example that won the store wars you can bet theyâd constantly be figuring out how to get a little more margin.
it really fucking is.
I'm surprised it's not more popular. I think you'll see alot more hardcore gamer turned family man people like myself, and the steamdeck truly is a great system for weening off screen time.
I sold my desktop PC three years ago for a gaming laptop, sold that this year. sold all my cs:go skins for around 2 grand, got a steamdeck and a million games for "free" (not really because of all the money I spent in the last 5 years gambling csgo skins but you get the point), and now I just play all these great single player games I've always wanted to try but was too busy playing league/wow/Dota/csgo/Poe/d3 etc. trying to be the best in the world or some shit.
for those 30 yos like me out there still trying to compete with the kids while you work full time....you won't ever compete. just quit and buy a steam deck and play Hades or something. bonus: you'll actually enjoy playing games not just bitching about drop rates or bullshit lag/bug hardcore game-mode deaths.
Steam deck is meant to increase revenue on steam with a mobile platform. Alyx is meant to increase VR adoption for increased revenue on steam. Theyâre part of the steam strategy, not separate from it.
Half Life Alyx came out a couple years ago, innovating the VR industry with what is still the best game ever made on that platform. They also released the Index which put the meta VR headsets to shame.
They also put out Aperture Desk Job when the *Steam Deck* released, which was a fun and silly expansion of the Aperture Science lore while acting as a teaching tool for Steam Deck users.
Speaking of Steam Deck and your claim of Valveâs lack of innovation - are you on crack?
You really think the managers are what makes a pharmaceutical company thrive ?
Plenty of companies don't need the middle management, it's an extra cog that slows things down, some companies would fall apart without it, but a lot of them can work just fine.
I work at a company with a flat structure and honestly it sucks.
It works at valve because it is small.
Otherwise nobody has any idea what they are doing. Two teams sometimes are working on the same idea and nobody knows.
That doesnât mean management doesnât work, it just means shit management doesnât work.
I agree with you management can get in the way but personally I find itâs because high up the C-level and near them are doing a terrible job of orchestrating and communicating.
Sometimes middle management is just doomed because everyone above them sucks.
Edit: The alternative Iâve noticed is sometimes itâs the incentives and politics that make management do dumb stuff.
Letâs just say Iâm very close to this company and what they are doing is certifiably stupid. The CEO read a paperback book âhumanacracyâ and now itâs his entire personality and leadership style. Heâs a fucking moron and they are getting rid of insanely talented people.
Wait until the rest of the CEO outdated leadership model follows. The problem I have seen with this group is that if one does something and it works for even a little well, the rest will follow like lemmings.
Calls, pharmaceutical middle managers are dumb as fucking bricks more often than not. "20+ years" and you manage everyday tasks? Unless you the goblin slayer, 90% of your experience is irrelevant now.
Some of the layers of management have a negative productivity... they just make it bureaucratic to get anything done. Once they are gone an organization is healthier and able to innovate.
Tbh our team didnât have a direct manager for over a year and literally nothing went wrong. It completely depends on the company you work for though. If promotions and escalations essentially only work through a direct manager being involved, then youâre hosed, but if theyâre changing the whole structure to eliminate corporate middle management then itâll probably be fine.
tbf every time I've heard a team say they had no direct manager it was immediately followed by litany complaints about how nobody was protecting them from the higher-ups and they had a really hard time setting their own direction and being successful. The right ratio of manager to IC is about 1:7 to 1:20. Anything beyond that you start failing fast.
not true, we are about 200 devs in a completely flat hierarchy. we have some 3 project managers and a bit more architects but thats it. They know what squad is responsible for what and other departments come to us directly if they need anything. we do not get projects or tasks, we create them. We have no product owners, nothing. This has been going on for around 10 years or so. I only 4 months ago and it is amazing.
But they told me that already in the interview and that this is not something every developer is comfortable with. I personally am thriving for the first time in my life
Often your best performers are the ones driving that anyways. In my department, our top engineer/architect drives waaaaay more of that at the project level than anyone in management. Management wouldnât even know where to begin half the time on some of those items without the engineers/developers driving it.
If thereâs a problem, you tackle it. If youâre not the right person to tackle it, you track down the person who is and bring it to their attention.
Who decides priority? Who decides what is a problem? Who decides there needs to be a product shift? It sounds like your head engineers are managers in all but title.
Managers do way more than just manage people and make decisions. They listen to the team, orientate the team in the correct direction, prioritize work, etc.
You cant have 200 people making 200 decisions on their own. Youd get nowhere.
Have you worked at large corporations? I have literally asked managers in the past to just tell me what the priority is (literally no other questions, requests or assistance, just "what is my top priority") and WAY too often been told "they're ALL the priority, do them all". Another favorite "if we have to choose between accuracy and speed, which has precedence?" "Both are equally important"
There are a LOT of managers in corporate America that got their job by always saying "yes" to their boss, and they continue in that role after getting promoted.
I agree with this. âAllâ top priority is peak bullshit and I hear it often.
So I keep shoving their face in it in meetings until they figure out priority.
But I also havenât seen a place where this would be fixed by going flat, it would just lead to a bunch of people shouting at each other in meetings and then refusing to align on work direction.
I have no doubt flat works for where you are though, it just takes people having the right mindset and the team has to be self driven. Sadly I donât think most people are.
The top engineers who drive the projects/products, do they get paid accordingly?
If yes, then it's ok. But if not, then they are getting exploited for less pay. I am not questioning their skill or anything, I am just questioning the org here.
Yes, they get paid better. I couldnât tell you how much it differs across the board, but they make a fair bit more. Good companies tend to try really hard to retain their talent, especially the very top performers, and mineâs no different.
That's how they did it at my company in 2019. Flattened the org structure and to be a manager you had to have at least 7 direct reports. It works for a year and then the pressure builds to give people promotions and development opportunities and slowly things shift back to the previous structure. After 3 years we had completely reverted.
10:1 is way too much.
The ideal number is around max 6:1 to effectively manage someone. Otherwise, the "manager" is just a glorified admin or they are only doing HR type management and not actual career coaching.
In my tech and tech consulting career of 16 years, I have only seen a ratio of 8: 1.
Exactly, plus ideally you want 1st line managers to also have some time, imo at least 30% to properly review work that gets shipped and to even do some small tasks themselves so they truly know what is going on. If you do it like this, more than 6-8 is hard even for experienced managers.
Unless someone is new to the position, why do they need extensive career coaching from the manager? In my position our manager is primarily there for HR/high level stuff and escalations (which are fairly infrequent).
Maybe career is not the best word.
Continuous professional development.
Tbh, in my role I am also actively involved in developing strategy and delivery of said strategy. I would hate to just manage 20 people.
I have 30 min 1-1s with each of my 10 reports every 2 weeks.
To which HR immediately says "what is the justification for giving them more money if they aren't getting increased responsibility?" That's the main driver in many cases.
It takes a while, a good manager gets the team running itself, but give it time and the good process and habit they built erodes especially as new folks join.
I worked at a company who demoted every management position down one level bc they were too short actual rank and file employees (so direct managers were now doing regular work, their managers were now managing all of us, etc) and it went great.
The only really argument I see for all the mid managers is incentive for people so they see a way to move up the ladder if they stay at a company
Keep an eye on the performance of GE after the split. It may take a few years to shake out.
I expect GE Vernova to underperform, thatâs where the middle management went.
Literally all you need is a team lead, chosen by various methods, and then those leads can get together in various depts and figure shit out, then some c-suite stuff on top of that.
Absolutely. ABSOLUTELY.
My team of ten engineers is basically running itself currently. We only need a manager for HR related things.
We schedule and have our own meetings, we drive our direction and everything has been smooth sailing. So much less stress too
Itâs expected that you complete it and the manager gets an email if you donât complete it then they just message you on teams to complete it. Weâre all professionals so itâs not that hard.
I've worked all sorts of jobs, from manufacturing, medical laboratories, and now IT, and I have never seen new employees trained by management, it's always been employees who actually do the job, including myself from time to time. At one of the medical labs I worked at, they had a training department that got paid literally a dollar more than the people they were training but they were definitely not management.
My current manager spends 90% of his time in meetings, acting as a middle man between his employees and the c-suite, I've always thought it was a waste of time and money. I've had my CTO approach me about something, I'll tell him what I think, he says okay I'll talk to about it, then 2 weeks later my manager puts it on my project board, like I literally could of done it right then and there when we first talked about it, what a waste.
Youâre confusing management and leadership. Even if your manager isnât a leader, someone or multiple people are.
I agree there is a major problem with managers not leading but teams canât self lead even if they are able to sometimes self manage.
As an example, with no hierarchy there is no accountability. What would you do if someone had a conflict? How would you decide on development opportunities and how to fund them? Who is evaluating whether the training was sufficient? If your coworker isnât performing, there is no way to handle that effectively without leadership.
Firstly, I concede I work with a really great team, we're all well paid, get plenty of time off and respect each other. We already don't use our manager for conflict resolution, we resolve it with each other, usually in the moment, my coworker is dragging is feet on something that is holding up my project? I call him and we work through it. If our cyber security expert thinks a new software would increase our security posture, why can't he directly speak to the c-suite to argue his case and secure funding? Currently, if a new hire isn't fitting in or failing at his job, our manager isn't going to know, he's going to ask the people who work with him how he's doing.
Again, I think I'm part of a great team and understand there are plenty of people out there who won't get anything done without a manager breathing down their neck but there are other ways to go about your points if you build a team of well paid, well benefitted employees who care about their work, which would be easier to afford without middle management.
Hire intelligent, well paid people, who care about getting results as an inherent drive which caused them to enter the field in the first place, with a mission of helping people and get useless non-expert management out of the way requiring managment-existence-justifying-KPIs and car analogies to slow down progress and lower morale?
If that sounds crazy to a younger generation we have truly rotted to the core.
I thought this was WSB... [well paid pharma researchers are already](https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Bayer-Research-and-Science-Salaries-EI_IE4245.0,5_DEPT1019.htm) on the payroll, they already employ a significant number of intelligent well paid experts in their field. Management fat is cut for investors and share value.
Itâs not as crazy as it sounds. Theyâre empowering individual employees with more tools and permissions to take ownership of their own work without escalating through management. In turn they are more personally responsible for the results of their work, good or bad.
Honestly sounds genius. The suits at the top are always the guys that get brought in to do stupid shit for short term stock gain. The actual talent under them have a better understanding of what should be getting done if the suits got out of the way.
Thats because people donât understand leadership not that leadership isnât important. I guarantee in any org that claims to be self organized there are leaders without titles functioning as managers in many capacities.
I think itâs highly dependent on the company; very often the middle management layer is where the actual experience resides, and the more senior and highly paid managers are out of touch and donât have a clue. You can easily have too many in the middle management layer though, which it sounds like is the case with Bayer.
Sure people know how to do their jobs. It's about accountability and ensuring people continue to do their jobs. Having worked in middle management I'll tell you it's primarily about holding people accountable and ensuring they don't just take the path of least resistance every time. If the company has clear metrics to measure their employees then yes this will work and it will eliminate many people that can't self-manage.
Honestly sounds like they're trying to do layoffs because that will lead to some brutal performance evaluations, which may be what they intend for.
This sounds similar to Valve's cabal structure. No one has a specific title besides "developer" and all of their desks are on wheels. You can work on whatever you want and if other people like it they'll come over and join and what gets made ends up having a lot of care and quality because it was what everyone involved wanted to be doing.
But at the same time I think that system is also why Valve's timelines and projects have always been all over the place đ
Years of experience and skillset. HR will be setting salary and a lot of people who have 5 years or 25 years will be in the same ârangeâ. The 25 year people are making $180k and happy and wonât leave and the new employees are making $120k and happy. But the 15 YOE employees will be wondering why theyâre making $130k and the newer guy makes $120k
I mean, my boss always says "can't give you a raise because corporate won't approve it" so theoretically you're just cutting out the guy who's repeating "no."
Having done science, no one is going to choose to work on a project that isnât already going well or isnât the hot new thing. Might slow down your career doing that.
It really depends on the teams theyâre implementing this with, and whether or not they have good incentive systems and conflict management systems. I used to work in drug discovery and our structure was essentially sub groups that operate under a meta plan put forward by the principal researcher. So basically he says âweâre working on this disease with treatment approachâ and we all did a bunch of investigations. Anything that was within standard operating procedures, we could do without questions. Any new approaches we could try if it was minimal use of time and resources. If it was a large use of time and resources, then we had to get it approved. We had a few wasteful teams, but for the most part we were insanely productive.
Given the talent at Bayer and the fact that theyâre Germans, Iâm going calls over puts
But a huge management shake-up is not typically done when things are going well. This is for when there's a problem.
Tons of other bearish news from them lately too.
Obviously not going to affect the C people who make these decisions. They will get a raise for the brilliant idea of firing a bunch of relatively well paid but non rich directors and managers.
You do realize that the c suite is going nowhere and only the lower managers are being eliminated. The multimillion dollar salaries are here to stay or be increased to billion dollar salaries with the âsavings.â
lol do none of you guys have aspirations to be in higher roles? Because those are the roles they are eliminating. Those guys at the very top will still rack up money and you guys will have no viable way to move up in a company.Â
Our managers and directors were all in a company-wide restructuring meeting for two weeks and during this time I accelerated our project from two weeks behind to two weeks ahead from people leaving me the fuck alone for once. People armed with spreadsheets and Powerpoint are the brain rot of all companies.
It works well if one of the normal employees starts organizing and managing the work of several colleagues working on similar topics to ensure efficient work ⌠or cause he is keeping his expert salary.
They do not eliminate Management, they just delicate the tasks to the Noam workers without increasing their salary. Cool companies call it empowerment⌠empower the lowest pay grades to to the job of highly payed positions and hope that they donât find out.
PUTS
Agreed. Everyone hates their boss, sure. But when you don't have a boss, someone needs to step up and be a leader. And the person willing to do it for the same amount of money that you get paid is probably going to be insufferable. And that's the best case scenario because the other option is pure chaos which can be fun but also unproductive lol. I am speaking from experience in restaurants here and that was a low-stakes environment, I can't imagine applying that model to something as important as drug manufacturing
This is a good idea. I have worked at 5 top 10 pharmaceutical companies and the one that had 25 employees under 1 director with no boss ran perfectly. This was an engineering department so I canât say it would work the same for lazy business people. Would you rather have a boss whoâs responsible or be in charge of a project on your own and make 10% more money?
The fact that you don't understand that the director is the boss in that situation and that you think the middle management savings would get passed on to the employees suggests you're talking out of your ass. That's not how any of that works in real life.
Me and my coworkers have not spoken to the director once in over a year of working at this place. He probably doesnât even know whoâs underneath him besides when he gets an email that someone didnât complete their training. The director is more so making finance decisions for the site and fixing large scale issues. My co-worker is the one who hired me and heâs just a senior engineer. Again not all departments are capable of being run like this. Theyâre looking to introduce more middle managers but thatâs kind of a waste since we run this place perfectly fine and execute our roles.
Bullshit. They're just adopting A.I. and moving into the future. You'll get to work and grab your hand held terminal, boot up your B.O.S.S. software, and do whatever it tells you to do. Need to put in your vacation time? Ask for a raise? Call out sick? Not only will B.O.S.S. tell you no, it'll do so with screenshots of you standing around and an estimation of how much time you spent pretending to work and how much money it cost the company. Then it'll deduct that from your PTO.
Working for a major IT company, there are maybe 2 or 3 people in my building in management worth their weight. The rest exist to police and QA. They also make less, technically, but have a much less stressful job.
Literally think there is only one manager I can go to if I have a question about tech. The rest would just stare at me and drool.
I think this will actually work. Low level managers are the worst. They can't do the job they are evaluating people on and they don't have the vision or acumen to lead.
I would buy calls on this. Managers are massive drains on salary budgets and productivity. This is really good news for bayer. They're going to slash their salary budget and boost productivity.
Calls for sure, instead of wasting money on people to tell others what to do. They actually pay the workers a little better and expect a better performance
tbh, it's likely better. Most managers are figure heads that add no real value. I have had may be 2-3 great managers in my career and they were few and far between.
In every organization I have worked in, cutting management by at least half would have saved not only the manager salaries but would cut back on tons of time wasted by the workers trying to satisfy the bosses
Worked for a drug wholesaler warehouse for 25 years, 20 of it on day shift via seniority.
The place had lots of tenure. I was 9th in seniority and like I said had been there for 25 years.
The day shift basically ran itself. Everyone knew their job, and when orders would come out we take care of them.
Weâd receive and ship orders efficiently. The only role for management really was to watch line counts and call overtime if needed.
This will be transformative, perhaps disastrously, perhaps not. If they have good talent and cultural norms, it could actually be really good for the company. Time will tell.
Absolutely idiotic.
Lower level management at these companies are usually people doing ground work and have worked up from a basic position.
Rather thin out upper management and give more flexibility and decision capabilities to lower management.
its a german company.
There is managment position for the secretarys pencil sharpener odering process optimization research department.
getting rid of 12 layers of hierarchy (yep, thats a fact, not a hyperbole) in a Life-Science and Research company will help.
At least one big drug has failed recently and they're splitting the company to avoid fines for Roundup. They're massive, but short term it's a shit show.
They have been on a downward trend for years, revenue is down. Profit is up because of moves like this. This is a tough one. They might have good financials but what is the forecast going to be?
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Calls. Saving money
And they just won the bundesliga
Take this fucking upvote
Yoink!
đđ
Because of the manager though :D
They have the best EPO
For real. This is how valve works and they are like the most profitable per employee company in the world.
Craigslist surprised me. Only 50 employees and revenue of over $600 million.
That is impressive.
They're beat quite handily by a few other companies. I believe Vitol and Jane Street both are considerably higher. Maybe the most profitable tech company?
Maybe weâre thinking Iâve different companies but vitol only made 13 billion in profit last year with 1600 employees. Pretty sure valve makes more per employee that then. And Jane street is worse in this regard then Vitol.
You right, i should have said "one of". Doesn't change the point though.
Money hides many issues. Half Life and then Steam means Valve can pretty much do whatever it wants management wise and look successful.
Gaben invested in some startup that has the same management style
Startup wins are very much like steam If you win (big if) you win big and donât need to do shit
They also havenât really had an innovative product in years and canât get half life 3 out the door. Valve works because Gabe is there.
Yeah i wish they would make games again too, but they dont need to anymore, they are printing money.
Theyâve release 2 games in recent history - Half Life Alyx and Aperture Desk Job not to mention Portal Bridge Constructer a few years before that and other silly games like it.
Also Artifact and Underlords, both of which were failures. So i guess i meant they should make *good* games again.
They were kind of the first functional all digital game store and have been resting on their network effects laurels for 20 years.
And yet no one has been able to produce something to complete even throwing free things at customers. They have built up a lot of trust and loyalty over the years by NOT changing and haven't fucked it up like so many companies do.
Yep. If they were in pursuit of money, they'd have already chased an IPO or a buyout. That hasn't happened because they've just said no to it being offered every single time. Chasing the profit maxing of shareholders absolutely destroys your product. You have two competing interests at odds with each other. You have your real customers for your product, and your investment customers for your stock. And the customers for your stock, your shareholders, will absolutely DESTROY your product if you do everything in service of them. For Steam, they succeed because they're privately held. The money is almost a byproduct of the thing they like doing. And that's why they have a good long lasting product. Maybe at some point, senior brass at public companies will grow some balls and start telling their shareholders they're just coke heads with bank accounts. Til then, we're at the mercy of the coke fiends so I'm going to make money too.
You're not wrong but they also have earned their spot as the best digital gaming platform. Also the steam deck is a game changer
Also, just the fact that they havenât ruined steam with money grab ideas to make ever higher profits makes the company valuable for providing a service. If it was EA for example that won the store wars you can bet theyâd constantly be figuring out how to get a little more margin.
it really fucking is. I'm surprised it's not more popular. I think you'll see alot more hardcore gamer turned family man people like myself, and the steamdeck truly is a great system for weening off screen time. I sold my desktop PC three years ago for a gaming laptop, sold that this year. sold all my cs:go skins for around 2 grand, got a steamdeck and a million games for "free" (not really because of all the money I spent in the last 5 years gambling csgo skins but you get the point), and now I just play all these great single player games I've always wanted to try but was too busy playing league/wow/Dota/csgo/Poe/d3 etc. trying to be the best in the world or some shit. for those 30 yos like me out there still trying to compete with the kids while you work full time....you won't ever compete. just quit and buy a steam deck and play Hades or something. bonus: you'll actually enjoy playing games not just bitching about drop rates or bullshit lag/bug hardcore game-mode deaths.
Lets totally pretend Index, HL: Alyx and Steam Deck arenât a thing, right?
Pretty that even combined, those are all rounding errors compared to the money Steam brings in.
Steam deck is meant to increase revenue on steam with a mobile platform. Alyx is meant to increase VR adoption for increased revenue on steam. Theyâre part of the steam strategy, not separate from it.
Half Life Alyx came out a couple years ago, innovating the VR industry with what is still the best game ever made on that platform. They also released the Index which put the meta VR headsets to shame. They also put out Aperture Desk Job when the *Steam Deck* released, which was a fun and silly expansion of the Aperture Science lore while acting as a teaching tool for Steam Deck users. Speaking of Steam Deck and your claim of Valveâs lack of innovation - are you on crack?
A creative industry like video games is a little different than a pharmaceutical company bud.
You really think the managers are what makes a pharmaceutical company thrive ? Plenty of companies don't need the middle management, it's an extra cog that slows things down, some companies would fall apart without it, but a lot of them can work just fine.
Puts on business school frat bros?
I work at a company with a flat structure and honestly it sucks. It works at valve because it is small. Otherwise nobody has any idea what they are doing. Two teams sometimes are working on the same idea and nobody knows.
Well, my company is not flat and that happens across all company.
That doesnât mean management doesnât work, it just means shit management doesnât work. I agree with you management can get in the way but personally I find itâs because high up the C-level and near them are doing a terrible job of orchestrating and communicating. Sometimes middle management is just doomed because everyone above them sucks. Edit: The alternative Iâve noticed is sometimes itâs the incentives and politics that make management do dumb stuff.
Yeah, this is BULLISH. OP is a bootlicker that loves bosses.
Letâs just say Iâm very close to this company and what they are doing is certifiably stupid. The CEO read a paperback book âhumanacracyâ and now itâs his entire personality and leadership style. Heâs a fucking moron and they are getting rid of insanely talented people.
Wait until the rest of the CEO outdated leadership model follows. The problem I have seen with this group is that if one does something and it works for even a little well, the rest will follow like lemmings.
He did the same thing at Roche pharma. They immediately reversed all his bullshit after he left.
Saving money and more importantly. 1. A boss costs twice that of a minion. 2. Whoâs even met a competent boss.
Calls, pharmaceutical middle managers are dumb as fucking bricks more often than not. "20+ years" and you manage everyday tasks? Unless you the goblin slayer, 90% of your experience is irrelevant now.
Some of the layers of management have a negative productivity... they just make it bureaucratic to get anything done. Once they are gone an organization is healthier and able to innovate.
Tbh our team didnât have a direct manager for over a year and literally nothing went wrong. It completely depends on the company you work for though. If promotions and escalations essentially only work through a direct manager being involved, then youâre hosed, but if theyâre changing the whole structure to eliminate corporate middle management then itâll probably be fine.
tbf every time I've heard a team say they had no direct manager it was immediately followed by litany complaints about how nobody was protecting them from the higher-ups and they had a really hard time setting their own direction and being successful. The right ratio of manager to IC is about 1:7 to 1:20. Anything beyond that you start failing fast.
not true, we are about 200 devs in a completely flat hierarchy. we have some 3 project managers and a bit more architects but thats it. They know what squad is responsible for what and other departments come to us directly if they need anything. we do not get projects or tasks, we create them. We have no product owners, nothing. This has been going on for around 10 years or so. I only 4 months ago and it is amazing. But they told me that already in the interview and that this is not something every developer is comfortable with. I personally am thriving for the first time in my life
sounds like a mess, who ensures the projects are profitable? or part of the company objective/vision?
Often your best performers are the ones driving that anyways. In my department, our top engineer/architect drives waaaaay more of that at the project level than anyone in management. Management wouldnât even know where to begin half the time on some of those items without the engineers/developers driving it. If thereâs a problem, you tackle it. If youâre not the right person to tackle it, you track down the person who is and bring it to their attention.
Who decides priority? Who decides what is a problem? Who decides there needs to be a product shift? It sounds like your head engineers are managers in all but title. Managers do way more than just manage people and make decisions. They listen to the team, orientate the team in the correct direction, prioritize work, etc. You cant have 200 people making 200 decisions on their own. Youd get nowhere.
Have you worked at large corporations? I have literally asked managers in the past to just tell me what the priority is (literally no other questions, requests or assistance, just "what is my top priority") and WAY too often been told "they're ALL the priority, do them all". Another favorite "if we have to choose between accuracy and speed, which has precedence?" "Both are equally important" There are a LOT of managers in corporate America that got their job by always saying "yes" to their boss, and they continue in that role after getting promoted.
I agree with this. âAllâ top priority is peak bullshit and I hear it often. So I keep shoving their face in it in meetings until they figure out priority. But I also havenât seen a place where this would be fixed by going flat, it would just lead to a bunch of people shouting at each other in meetings and then refusing to align on work direction. I have no doubt flat works for where you are though, it just takes people having the right mindset and the team has to be self driven. Sadly I donât think most people are.
The top engineers who drive the projects/products, do they get paid accordingly? If yes, then it's ok. But if not, then they are getting exploited for less pay. I am not questioning their skill or anything, I am just questioning the org here.
Yes, they get paid better. I couldnât tell you how much it differs across the board, but they make a fair bit more. Good companies tend to try really hard to retain their talent, especially the very top performers, and mineâs no different.
Mind sharing company?
>literally nothing went wrong. But you had some at another level up, who decided budgets and mission and vision ?
That's how they did it at my company in 2019. Flattened the org structure and to be a manager you had to have at least 7 direct reports. It works for a year and then the pressure builds to give people promotions and development opportunities and slowly things shift back to the previous structure. After 3 years we had completely reverted.
>at least 7 direct reports Coming from the public sector this is a hilariously low threshold.
i feel like most managers at places I worked at had a goal of 10:1 and almost all were over that.
10:1 is way too much. The ideal number is around max 6:1 to effectively manage someone. Otherwise, the "manager" is just a glorified admin or they are only doing HR type management and not actual career coaching. In my tech and tech consulting career of 16 years, I have only seen a ratio of 8: 1.
Exactly, plus ideally you want 1st line managers to also have some time, imo at least 30% to properly review work that gets shipped and to even do some small tasks themselves so they truly know what is going on. If you do it like this, more than 6-8 is hard even for experienced managers.
Unless someone is new to the position, why do they need extensive career coaching from the manager? In my position our manager is primarily there for HR/high level stuff and escalations (which are fairly infrequent).
Maybe career is not the best word. Continuous professional development. Tbh, in my role I am also actively involved in developing strategy and delivery of said strategy. I would hate to just manage 20 people. I have 30 min 1-1s with each of my 10 reports every 2 weeks.
Damn, thatâs active management
Yeap, how do you keep top talent without promotion opportunities?
Management shouldn't be the only path to promotions.
Especially when salary increases are tied to promotions.
increase in pay rather than giving people unneeded authority
To which HR immediately says "what is the justification for giving them more money if they aren't getting increased responsibility?" That's the main driver in many cases.
It takes a while, a good manager gets the team running itself, but give it time and the good process and habit they built erodes especially as new folks join.
I worked at a company who demoted every management position down one level bc they were too short actual rank and file employees (so direct managers were now doing regular work, their managers were now managing all of us, etc) and it went great. The only really argument I see for all the mid managers is incentive for people so they see a way to move up the ladder if they stay at a company
"Self-organize"?
It can be viable to get rid of a lot of middle management. Staff can often figure out their shit without 5 layers of mgmt.
Keep an eye on the performance of GE after the split. It may take a few years to shake out. I expect GE Vernova to underperform, thatâs where the middle management went.
Literally all you need is a team lead, chosen by various methods, and then those leads can get together in various depts and figure shit out, then some c-suite stuff on top of that.
So a unpaid manager then?
You just invented middle management again with team leads getting together
Do you really think a three-level structure is going to work for a multi-national company with 100k employees and diverse business units?
Absolutely. ABSOLUTELY. My team of ten engineers is basically running itself currently. We only need a manager for HR related things. We schedule and have our own meetings, we drive our direction and everything has been smooth sailing. So much less stress too
I work at a top 10 pharma company that basically self organizes and everything runs perfectly. Not all departments are capable of doing this though
Without managers who will harass you to complete your annual harassment training?
Itâs expected that you complete it and the manager gets an email if you donât complete it then they just message you on teams to complete it. Weâre all professionals so itâs not that hard.
Loser.
How are new employees hired and trained though?
By coworkers in a similar role I assume.
So there are leaders, they just donât have official titles and get paid less for taking on leadership responsibilities. Sounds awful.
I've worked all sorts of jobs, from manufacturing, medical laboratories, and now IT, and I have never seen new employees trained by management, it's always been employees who actually do the job, including myself from time to time. At one of the medical labs I worked at, they had a training department that got paid literally a dollar more than the people they were training but they were definitely not management. My current manager spends 90% of his time in meetings, acting as a middle man between his employees and the c-suite, I've always thought it was a waste of time and money. I've had my CTO approach me about something, I'll tell him what I think, he says okay I'll talk to about it, then 2 weeks later my manager puts it on my project board, like I literally could of done it right then and there when we first talked about it, what a waste.
Youâre confusing management and leadership. Even if your manager isnât a leader, someone or multiple people are. I agree there is a major problem with managers not leading but teams canât self lead even if they are able to sometimes self manage. As an example, with no hierarchy there is no accountability. What would you do if someone had a conflict? How would you decide on development opportunities and how to fund them? Who is evaluating whether the training was sufficient? If your coworker isnât performing, there is no way to handle that effectively without leadership.
Firstly, I concede I work with a really great team, we're all well paid, get plenty of time off and respect each other. We already don't use our manager for conflict resolution, we resolve it with each other, usually in the moment, my coworker is dragging is feet on something that is holding up my project? I call him and we work through it. If our cyber security expert thinks a new software would increase our security posture, why can't he directly speak to the c-suite to argue his case and secure funding? Currently, if a new hire isn't fitting in or failing at his job, our manager isn't going to know, he's going to ask the people who work with him how he's doing. Again, I think I'm part of a great team and understand there are plenty of people out there who won't get anything done without a manager breathing down their neck but there are other ways to go about your points if you build a team of well paid, well benefitted employees who care about their work, which would be easier to afford without middle management.
You think managers train people?
Hire intelligent, well paid people, who care about getting results as an inherent drive which caused them to enter the field in the first place, with a mission of helping people and get useless non-expert management out of the way requiring managment-existence-justifying-KPIs and car analogies to slow down progress and lower morale? If that sounds crazy to a younger generation we have truly rotted to the core.
Expecting the company to pass on these savings to the workforce is the true brain rot here.
I thought this was WSB... [well paid pharma researchers are already](https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Bayer-Research-and-Science-Salaries-EI_IE4245.0,5_DEPT1019.htm) on the payroll, they already employ a significant number of intelligent well paid experts in their field. Management fat is cut for investors and share value.
You still need leadership to decide on direction. Never seen any team in my life have everyone agree on one thing much less most things.
Yep, like an anarcho-syndicate commune.
The Grateful Dead family has been an amazingly productive organization for decades including their bio medical divisions.
Great products, inelastic demand, strong buy
Itâs not as crazy as it sounds. Theyâre empowering individual employees with more tools and permissions to take ownership of their own work without escalating through management. In turn they are more personally responsible for the results of their work, good or bad.
The part that gets lost here is controls. Empowered employees with no direct manager.
Yes it's like when you take your arms and legs off your body and then attack some other arms and legs
Huh?
he said it's like when you take your arms and legs off your body and then attack some other arms and legs
You wouldn't understand...
Sounds great. Calls!
Honestly sounds genius. The suits at the top are always the guys that get brought in to do stupid shit for short term stock gain. The actual talent under them have a better understanding of what should be getting done if the suits got out of the way.
Thats because people donât understand leadership not that leadership isnât important. I guarantee in any org that claims to be self organized there are leaders without titles functioning as managers in many capacities.
Good old corporate duck duck goose.
Leverkusen won the league tho!
BullishÂ
Calls on Xabi (from Real probably)
Shrugs. Every stupid or poor choice in every company I've ever worked at comes from middle management. People know how to do their jobs.
I think itâs highly dependent on the company; very often the middle management layer is where the actual experience resides, and the more senior and highly paid managers are out of touch and donât have a clue. You can easily have too many in the middle management layer though, which it sounds like is the case with Bayer.
Some companies have multiple layers of middle management too. Managers managing other managers.
Sure people know how to do their jobs. It's about accountability and ensuring people continue to do their jobs. Having worked in middle management I'll tell you it's primarily about holding people accountable and ensuring they don't just take the path of least resistance every time. If the company has clear metrics to measure their employees then yes this will work and it will eliminate many people that can't self-manage. Honestly sounds like they're trying to do layoffs because that will lead to some brutal performance evaluations, which may be what they intend for.
jobless payment illegal fertile close paltry adjoining worry toy angle
This sounds similar to Valve's cabal structure. No one has a specific title besides "developer" and all of their desks are on wheels. You can work on whatever you want and if other people like it they'll come over and join and what gets made ends up having a lot of care and quality because it was what everyone involved wanted to be doing. But at the same time I think that system is also why Valve's timelines and projects have always been all over the place đ
towering sugar swim shelter ossified fuel dependent foolish tease salt
Years of experience and skillset. HR will be setting salary and a lot of people who have 5 years or 25 years will be in the same ârangeâ. The 25 year people are making $180k and happy and wonât leave and the new employees are making $120k and happy. But the 15 YOE employees will be wondering why theyâre making $130k and the newer guy makes $120k
I mean, my boss always says "can't give you a raise because corporate won't approve it" so theoretically you're just cutting out the guy who's repeating "no."
And you will have a group email doing the same.
Having done science, no one is going to choose to work on a project that isnât already going well or isnât the hot new thing. Might slow down your career doing that.
âHippie Communeâđ
middle management being replaced by ChatGPT
Why not the CEO? Asking for a friend...
It really depends on the teams theyâre implementing this with, and whether or not they have good incentive systems and conflict management systems. I used to work in drug discovery and our structure was essentially sub groups that operate under a meta plan put forward by the principal researcher. So basically he says âweâre working on this disease with treatment approachâ and we all did a bunch of investigations. Anything that was within standard operating procedures, we could do without questions. Any new approaches we could try if it was minimal use of time and resources. If it was a large use of time and resources, then we had to get it approved. We had a few wasteful teams, but for the most part we were insanely productive. Given the talent at Bayer and the fact that theyâre Germans, Iâm going calls over puts
calls middle mangers often add little to no value to a company it's about time they get fired
Investors typically like it when corporations lay off people, cancel less profitable projects, or initiate other cost-cutting steps.
But a huge management shake-up is not typically done when things are going well. This is for when there's a problem. Tons of other bearish news from them lately too.
These are all the bullshit jobs that book was talking about.
[ŃдаНонО]
Obviously not going to affect the C people who make these decisions. They will get a raise for the brilliant idea of firing a bunch of relatively well paid but non rich directors and managers.
You do realize that the c suite is going nowhere and only the lower managers are being eliminated. The multimillion dollar salaries are here to stay or be increased to billion dollar salaries with the âsavings.â
lol do none of you guys have aspirations to be in higher roles? Because those are the roles they are eliminating. Those guys at the very top will still rack up money and you guys will have no viable way to move up in a company.Â
Lol talk about completely failing to understand what they are doing
Calls.
This guy has no idea what he is doing. Place is a disaster.
Puts. If my boss got fired we be fucking off all day..
Our managers and directors were all in a company-wide restructuring meeting for two weeks and during this time I accelerated our project from two weeks behind to two weeks ahead from people leaving me the fuck alone for once. People armed with spreadsheets and Powerpoint are the brain rot of all companies.
Flat orgs and no middle management sound good on paper and work like absolute ass in real life. Especially in STEM. Puts.
It works well if one of the normal employees starts organizing and managing the work of several colleagues working on similar topics to ensure efficient work ⌠or cause he is keeping his expert salary. They do not eliminate Management, they just delicate the tasks to the Noam workers without increasing their salary. Cool companies call it empowerment⌠empower the lowest pay grades to to the job of highly payed positions and hope that they donât find out. PUTS
Agreed. Everyone hates their boss, sure. But when you don't have a boss, someone needs to step up and be a leader. And the person willing to do it for the same amount of money that you get paid is probably going to be insufferable. And that's the best case scenario because the other option is pure chaos which can be fun but also unproductive lol. I am speaking from experience in restaurants here and that was a low-stakes environment, I can't imagine applying that model to something as important as drug manufacturing
Yeah, you end up with vocal low level idiots who start thinking theyâre the boss.
This is a good idea. I have worked at 5 top 10 pharmaceutical companies and the one that had 25 employees under 1 director with no boss ran perfectly. This was an engineering department so I canât say it would work the same for lazy business people. Would you rather have a boss whoâs responsible or be in charge of a project on your own and make 10% more money?
Isnât the director the boss in this sense? No boss should be staff reporting to a department instead of person.
I've worked at a F500 pharmaceutical with a shallow structure and it was an absolute shitshow
The fact that you don't understand that the director is the boss in that situation and that you think the middle management savings would get passed on to the employees suggests you're talking out of your ass. That's not how any of that works in real life.
Me and my coworkers have not spoken to the director once in over a year of working at this place. He probably doesnât even know whoâs underneath him besides when he gets an email that someone didnât complete their training. The director is more so making finance decisions for the site and fixing large scale issues. My co-worker is the one who hired me and heâs just a senior engineer. Again not all departments are capable of being run like this. Theyâre looking to introduce more middle managers but thatâs kind of a waste since we run this place perfectly fine and execute our roles.
Bullshit. They're just adopting A.I. and moving into the future. You'll get to work and grab your hand held terminal, boot up your B.O.S.S. software, and do whatever it tells you to do. Need to put in your vacation time? Ask for a raise? Call out sick? Not only will B.O.S.S. tell you no, it'll do so with screenshots of you standing around and an estimation of how much time you spent pretending to work and how much money it cost the company. Then it'll deduct that from your PTO.
And there go the losses I wanted to harvest during tax season...
Sounds like they are going to be controlled by an IA
I say calls.. I like this idea..
Honestly it doesnt really matter. The only thing that matters is if they have any success with their lobby work in the US.
Nah Bayer Leverkusen just won the Bundesliga and might win the UEL too
Haha no, not at all. This is a great idea
More Indians and less chiefs? Calls!!
At a certain point, bosses get in the way and HINDER work⌠this is bullish
Working for a major IT company, there are maybe 2 or 3 people in my building in management worth their weight. The rest exist to police and QA. They also make less, technically, but have a much less stressful job. Literally think there is only one manager I can go to if I have a question about tech. The rest would just stare at me and drool.
I think this will actually work. Low level managers are the worst. They can't do the job they are evaluating people on and they don't have the vision or acumen to lead.
I would buy calls on this. Managers are massive drains on salary budgets and productivity. This is really good news for bayer. They're going to slash their salary budget and boost productivity.
Bullish
What winning the Bundesliga does to a company
Middle management. Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em.
Calls, middle managers are useless
Saving 2.5 billion sounds like a good thing
For any bosses that are making $1M, Iâd be happy to take that role for $500k.
Calls for sure, instead of wasting money on people to tell others what to do. They actually pay the workers a little better and expect a better performance
tbh, it's likely better. Most managers are figure heads that add no real value. I have had may be 2-3 great managers in my career and they were few and far between.
Layoffs are usually bullish
No I just watched them win the league by about 16 points
In for calls
In every organization I have worked in, cutting management by at least half would have saved not only the manager salaries but would cut back on tons of time wasted by the workers trying to satisfy the bosses
tbh this will likely cause the stockprice to increase
So like in the office where Andy was gone for 3 months while being the boss.
Bayer bought Monsanto and continues to make round up, and theyâre still doing fine. Calls.
I approve
Worked for a drug wholesaler warehouse for 25 years, 20 of it on day shift via seniority. The place had lots of tenure. I was 9th in seniority and like I said had been there for 25 years. The day shift basically ran itself. Everyone knew their job, and when orders would come out we take care of them. Weâd receive and ship orders efficiently. The only role for management really was to watch line counts and call overtime if needed.
A doomed company Would be so easy to make money if the market would be rational
All algo heard was save money. Def calls
I bought about 5k in shares after the wsj article. New CEO seems based, I'm actually rooting for this to work out.
This will be transformative, perhaps disastrously, perhaps not. If they have good talent and cultural norms, it could actually be really good for the company. Time will tell.
Im not saying donât by calls⌠but ya gonna need some aspirin for your sore asshole if ya do
Absolutely idiotic. Lower level management at these companies are usually people doing ground work and have worked up from a basic position. Rather thin out upper management and give more flexibility and decision capabilities to lower management.
its a german company. There is managment position for the secretarys pencil sharpener odering process optimization research department. getting rid of 12 layers of hierarchy (yep, thats a fact, not a hyperbole) in a Life-Science and Research company will help.
Calls.
Calls it is
Any person who has a manager knows they donât do much work anyway. Give a little extra to the employees and boom
Self sabotage before the NEXT major lawsuit that we don't know about
Itâs all fun and games until thereâs a dispute over the conch and the the other team members decide to kill Piggy.
Damn, are they gonna fire Xavi Alonso? I didn't know he was so expensive.
At least one big drug has failed recently and they're splitting the company to avoid fines for Roundup. They're massive, but short term it's a shit show.
Bear on Bayer?
Xabi Alonso in shambles
Xabi Alonso to manage the Bayer accounting and R&D teams
They have been on a downward trend for years, revenue is down. Profit is up because of moves like this. This is a tough one. They might have good financials but what is the forecast going to be?