Mark Zuckerberg doesn't like seeing 'managers managing managers'

So does he want a smaller company or a wider management span at each level? Because managers managing managers is a natural consequence of sane limits on span of supervision <i>plus</i> a large organization. At 15 direct reports (around what is typically cited as a reasonable upper bound), maxing out every manager, you reach (<i>not</i> counting the CEO as top manager!) managers managing managers at 15^3 = 3375 total employees. At 50,625 employees you’ve fully saturated another <i>level</i> of managers. Meta is around 70k employees.<p>And those numbers all assume that <i>all</i> direct reports of a N-level manager are N-1 level managers, where often they’ll have some N-1 level managers, some (if they aren’t at level 2) lower-level managers, and some non-managers, which makes the total number of employees smaller for any given number of levels.

This is a pretty bad headline. The article quotes him as saying “I don&#x27;t think you want a management structure that&#x27;s just managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who are doing the work.” Zuck doesn’t actually think Meta could get rid of everyone between him and the ICs, like the title makes it sound.

This is like saying you don&#x27;t like Generals managing Colonels. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.army.mil&#x2F;ranks&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.army.mil&#x2F;ranks&#x2F;</a>

I’m sure there are plenty of org inefficiencies that need to be restructured or eliminated. Early in my career, I would simply nod along to a headline like this. Now, I realize any single individual lacks the imaginative capacity to accurately know how much stuff large orgs naturally end up doing in service of even a limited set of simple goals. A limited number of simple goals at a large enough scale require an explosion of seemingly unimportant work. That’s just entropy.

Is that not his job description?

Managers managing managers managing managers managing managers… If you are trying to find bloat in your organization, this should be where you start.

This is all an annealing process over time to fit the company to the mission.<p>Unfortunately, coordinating directions between 10,000 people means that you have managers managing managers somewhere.<p>Maybe General AI will fix this some day, and executive decisions will directly be translated to everyone in exactly their job function relevance.