Item — HN Reader

for someone like VAG or UPS why not? You can only remember/cram so much context into a single persons head, at some point you gotta split it up. In IT, you rarely see companies having managers with more than 6 direct reports. Of course in retail that number can bump up. But if you have a 4 or 5 thousand employees - you'll have 6 layers. Of course there are ways around it (I worked at F500 where i only talked to my boss rarely, and was managed by others on my team).

VAG employs 600,000 people - that you have 8 or 10 layers is not absurd.

2 comments

We’re now 50 years in on a personal computer revolution, and people on HN and elsewhere haven’t managed to escape industrial-style management thinking.

If we can have billions of people organised - in their time away from formal work - into small working groups (“families”) generating a crazy amount of value for themselves and their communities, with no overarching management structure, what is possible today?

Franchises are often very light on layers of management yet have hundreds of thousands of workers.

The larger the enterprise, the less it has to look like an industrial firm.

Information flow, coordination and oversight don’t require layers and layers of managers, it’s just that those managers prefer it, since they’ve never seen anything else, they get paid more for “their important work” and have status for managing managers.

Change that and we might be in quite a different, probably better world?

Sure, but as a point of comparison the Roman Catholic Church has even more people worldwide and manages to make do with only 4 management layers. (I'm referring to those in religious orders only, not secular employees of various Catholic businesses and charities.)

Yes the Catholic Church still employs people besides priests but that's a good one!