Joel Spolsky — How I Learned to Love Middle Managers

You have to be careful when it comes to embracing the latest business idea. A single anecdote filtered through the eyes of a journalist about a new cool philosophy for running a company has to be considered in the light of other evidence, such as the way thousands of other companies are set up and operate.

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    Ten years ago, while I was working at Juno... I noticed too many situations in which members of top management happily issued an executive fiat even though they were the least qualified to make a decision. I'm not saying that they were stupid, mind you. Most of the managers at Juno were quite smart. But they had hired even smarter people to work for them: people with advanced degrees, raw intellectual firepower, and years of experience. And these people would work on a problem for a long time, come up with a pretty good solution, and then watch in surprise as their bosses overruled them. Executives who did not have specific technical knowledge and who had not studied a problem in depth would swoop down and issue some random, uninformed decree, and it would be implemented -- often with farcical results. ...

    ...my partner and I ... we wanted to hire great people and then get out of their way. My instinct to do away with middle management was further encouraged when I read an article in one of those glossy business magazines...

    And for a while, the Everybody Reports to Me system worked just fine. ... [But] last year, we began to realize that things had changed. ... Another programmer came to us and said bluntly "I thought you should know that people are really unhappy, and it's starting to make it so that people just complain all day, instead of doing their work, and that's not good."

    I spent a week having long talks with everyone and figuring out what was really going on. ...we appointed leaders for two of the programming teams -- in effect, creating that layer of hierarchy that I had tried to avoid.

    And frankly, people here seem to be happier with a little bit of middle management. Not middle management that's going to overrule the decisions they make on their own. Not symbolic middle management that only makes people feel important. But middle management that creates useful channels of communication. If my job is getting obstacles out of the way so my employees can get their work done, these managers exist so that, when an employee has a local problem, there's someone there, in the office next door, whom they can talk to.

    The lesson is, Don't believe everything you read in a business magazine. Not even this one.

(in toto)