Baldur Bjarnason
One weird consequence of the current spate of layoffs are the regular reminders that most people in tech have reactionary opinions on management that would have been considered outdated in the 60s.
This would be bad enough on its own, but they also have zero curiosity about anything even remotely current (like, say, post 1970) in management research and theory.
You lot are supposed to be smart and intellectually curious, and not clinging to your organisational footguns like a comfort blankie.
Baldur Bjarnason
@gotofritz A few examples:
1. There’s a lot of evidence that performance variations from employee to employee have more to do with the system they’re working in than with the employees themselves. Usually formulated by people like Deming as something like “95% of performance variation comes from the system”. So, employee performance evaluations are often quite harmful as you’re essentially putting the employee’s job at risk by making them responsible for something out of their control
gotofritz
@baldur That sounds interesting, do you have any examples of what you mean?
Baldur Bjarnason
@gotofritz But performance evaluations and the notion of a 10x developer (or, conversely, slacker employees, or the idea that 20% of the employees do the actual work while the rest coast doing nothing) is still strongly ingrained in tech culture.
2. Layoffs are almost entirely counterproductive and a symptom of severe mismanagement. They almost never improve productivity or profit and quite often end up destroying a lot of shareholder value. Same thing with mergers and acquisitions btw
Baldur Bjarnason
3. Diversity in the workplace generally improves productivity, esp. for knowledge and office work. It’s often a high ROI action. Same with improving access in general. Anything making something accessible that was previously inaccessible also strongly tends to improve access to that thing in general which is often a measurable improvement in productivity.
Baldur Bjarnason
4. Top-down micromanagment (called command-and-control management in work psychology) is counterproductive, makes organisations slower and less responsive, increases costs, and decreases employee retention
That’s off the top of my head. Most of this is either Work/Organisational Psychology 101 or straight out of starter texts in the Systems-Thinking school of management theory, like “The Germ Theory of Management” or Deming’s “Out of the Crisis”.
ouinne
@baldur I agree, im alwats amazed to the degree that Taylorism is still the norm for the most savvy managers in tech, it’s embarrassing. They’ll immediately insist their whole teams learn a new tech three weeks after it hits the trade publications big none of the senior managers have ever apparently cracked a single book on managing!
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.