New Kind of Management

Currently line manager’s responsibilities seem to include:

-Hire

-Fire

-Promote

-Identify tasks

-Prioritize tasks

-Assign tasks

-Keep tasks on track

-Make sure things are tested/validated

-Feedback to reports

-Feedback from customers/partners

-Review designs and architure

-Review code

-Setup standards

-Identify team painpoints

-Motivate

-Keep tabs on system health

-Acquire funding from higher ups

-Market value to higher ups

-Stay aligned with values and vision

-Identify new developments

-Keep tabs on competition

-Drive cross team items

-Ensure inter-team collaborations

-Write and ship some code 🙂

It looks to me lot of these things can be “automated” or distributed. For example, hiring can be mainly done by centralized hiring committees which is seasoned in making hiring decisions. Firing and promotions should be based on mainly peer/tech lead feedback. Lot of other responsibilities can be minimized if managers had only, say, 2 reports. When that happens, what you really get is