I think something is lost in translation, Dmitry. I’m not advocating for micromanagement. But the absence of micromanagement does not mean a manager is doing a good job (they may be not managing at all). However it’s pretty perfect that Steve Jobs has a similar view; he managed as an absolute tyrant and micromanager. I’m not sure what he was smoking when he said or wrote that.

dorf: At a sufficiently large or mature company, I’m generally against managers for the same reasons (I actively worked at CCP to reduce the number of managers and eventually eliminate my own position). At a small start-up, I’m having a difficult time seeing how to make decisions quickly without managers, but I’m actively trying to figure it out. Though I suspect bad managers implode far more quickly at startups so maybe it is less of a concern?

“It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”

Getting out of the way doesn’t necessary (or at all) mean that you as a boss don’t need to micromanage your employees. The thing is that you have to understand what they suggest with their talents, and be smart enough to bring their ideas to life.

I may miss some language context since I’m not native English speaking person, but in this case I’m pretty sure there’s no micromanagement context in here.

hehehe. So there’s at least one person who benefits from all those platitudes. Just wait till people start mailing them to you just to see some new posts ;)

Another manager liked to do meetings. Pointless, irritating meetings. He was always worried about things. He barely understood the codebase, but made “decisions” about how we should be doing things. I ended up hating this experience and quitting.

Management quotes irritate me most of the time, especially when you encounter them at work. E.g. the famous “what you can’t define, you can’t measure, what you can’t measure, you can’t manage”. Once I was in a meeting where a manager “measured” complex technical tasks by various ridiculous measures and then selected most important tasks by those “measures”. While you get a sense of management there, you just failed to select what’s really most important if you had technical insight.

Long story short, management quotes should be left for Dilbert to make fun of. All too often they oversimplify what actually needs to be done. Like with the quote in question, reality is, most often you won’t be able to hire talented people, you’ll be hiring a whole range from phds to interns, and not all of them will be “gifted” or “talented” or “extraordinary”, they’ll get the job done, some effectively, some less, some might even be talented.