This has been on the spike awhile awaiting a free coffee break, Some time ago Paul Graham
wrote this piece on the difference between managers and makers. And having done both jobs, I felt someone had to stick up for the much maligned management:
There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule. The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you're doing every hour.
When you use time that way, it's merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you're done.
Most powerful people are on the manager's schedule. It's the schedule of command. But there's another way of using time that's common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started.
When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That's no problem for someone on the manager's schedule. There's always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker's schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.
For someone on the maker's schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn't merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.
Akshully, this sort of work was done yonks ago by white collar productivity specialists (aka Taylorists). The tradeoff for the Maker is setup/teardown time vs process time, its a calculation nearly as old as work study itself and basically says don't disturb people who are concentrating on long setup stuff stuff with phone calls etc. Makers may be aghast to know that the algorithms are called thing like "N jobs on M resources" calculation. "Manager" work, being less concentration intensive, requires shorter setups/teardowns so can run in smaller "batches" of time (one of which may be used to calculate the N jobs on M resources).
But, what Paul conveniently forgets (or, to be kinder, maybe his Y combinator companies are so small that minimal co-ordination is required) in his polemic is Money. Yes, dear reader - above a certain size of company, assignment size etc it is far, far cheaper to chuck the Makers off their precious concentration time to find out what they are doing, as (bitter experience here, believe me) you can find they can be doing any number of the following:
- The wrong thing (or more likely, something that is interesting but not the customers' priority and thus the Stuff That Will Pay The Salaries)
- Not collaborating with the other bunch of Makers over there to get a joined up process, which is unfortunate as Maker Group A's stuff relies on Maker Group,B's stuff etc etc
- Re inventing something that we already have/can get/needs a bit of modification because its is not "perfect"
- Going down interesting side tasks rather than (boringly) fixing the critical path stuff that generates on-time delivery and thus money and a removal of the threat of penalty clauses
- Neglecting irksome tasks like documentation, version cotrol, configuration management and testing because thats like, dull - but not doing it early plays havoc with support costs
- Just generally f*cking up (sorry, "requiring re-orienting towards company and objective priorities")
In other words, unchecked Makerdom can chuck Money down the drain pretty fast. Its symbiotic you see - no sales without product, no product without sales........
Now, this is not to say one can not minimise Maker setup/teardown times - meetings first thing in the morning or later in the afternoon, catching them when they are playing foosball in the canteen etc) - but as any Mathematician or Manager can tell you, a company runs as much on money coming in and going out as on stuff being made..
