Joel Spolsky has a new Inc. article online now, about how he was kind of forced into implementing middle management at Fog Creek Software, the company he co-founded and runs. I must admit, I greeted the title of the article with some skepticism.
Like him, I have unpleasant memories of middle managers. I worked for ten years at the Post Office as a maintenance technician. The building was divided in two, once side for first-class mail and the other for what was euphemistically referred to as “bulk business mail” (we weren’t allowed to call it “junk mail”). It was a seven-day-a-week, twenty-four-hours-a-day operation, with three eight-hour shifts. Each shift, on each side of the building, had one or two supervisors, and the people who worked on that shift reported to them. They, in turn, reported to an extremely large fellow by the name of Big Bill, who was the only one who reported to the plant’s maintenance manager.
I was never able to figure out what Big Bill really did. He showed up on whatever shift he wanted to, usually the day shift or half day-shift and half evening-shift. When he was there, he would just sit in the supervisor’s office and bore the shift supervisor(s) who were on that night with talk about inconsequentialities like his fishing (from the ones I discussed it with, all of them despised him). When he got bored, he would walk to the cafeteria, or to the other side of the building. And that was all he did, day in and day out.
He couldn’t fix anything. Even if he knew how (which I never determined), managers and supervisors weren’t allowed to do non-management work, by union rules (the Postal unions were another sore spot with me, but that’s a subject for a different article). He didn’t make any decisions, because most of the shift supervisors were former maintenance workers themselves, and were mostly very competent. And the workers — the ones who chose to work, at least — were also generally competent. The only purpose I could see that he served was to take issues from the supervisors to the maintenance manager, and to serve as a whipping-boy when something went wrong.
His position was entirely political; if it was eliminated, no one but the shift supervisors would even realize it (and then only because he wouldn’t be around to bore them). And he knew it, you could see that in how he would sweat when he was around people of a higher grade than he, and in his obsequious attitude toward them, hoping that they wouldn’t realize how unnecessary he really was. You could really see it when “Carvin’ Marvin” Runyon became Postmaster General and started cutting the fat out of the organization… somehow he survived those years, much to everyone’s disgust.
I’m a results-oriented technical guy. I have no use for purely ornamental fripperies or purely ornamental people. I judge a person’s professional worth by the value that he adds to the company, and Big Bill was professionally all but worthless. As he’s the only example of middle management that I have, you can probably see why the title of Spolsky’s article generated a raised eyebrow. But the article does make a good case for a limited sort of middle management, so I’d recommend it to anyone in business. Especially management.