in this world, as Joanna says, the person directly supervising you is more accurately a team lead or lead engineer they are usually working with you. they make sure you don't abuse your time off privileges and maybe mentor or coach - going over your code, to make sure you're implementing in house standards, etc.
the next person up on the chain, that person is buffer (in IT) between the chaos that is the world of senior management and the world of the engineers.
As for the comments from the person who replied, I'm still not grokking what you are saying.
I'm really not clear on what a mini-manager is, how a boss eliminates formal hierarchy and why she should do that, what advantages accrue and why what sounds like informal hierarchy of peer ratings are an improvement. Sorry to be thick but the lack of concrete example is making it difficult for me to grok when a mini manager in your head is bad and when it's just being a good colleague.
i'm reminded of an article someone sent me last year. it was in new left review, an excellent piece about how time and labor discipline works among software engineers. the author said something terribly true about the modern workplace which is now focused on tasks, not time. whereas you used to punch holes in metal with a rivet gun over and over, now you're doing mental work based on projects and working collectively in small teams. everyone depends on the work of everyone else to get anything done. you can never take time off and escape work. you take a sick day and you end up coming in to work the next day with the task still staring at you. no one can be recruited in the course of a day or two of sick leave to ramp up enough to jump into your work and finish. it waits there, for you. cause you're a special snowflake, just like everyone else. :)
Joanna: I work in hi tech so my observations might be skewed. In the big corporations, front line managers have so many direct reports (20 on average) that they are unable to directly manage anything. Most of my communications w my mgr have to do with 1) I can make the deadline or 2) I can't make the deadline. Otherwise, I'm on my own. Which is fine by me.
In small corporations, say, a few hundred workers, the manager is usually also a worker part time and most of the interaction has to do with planning and, again, deadlines. Mostly I'm on my own.
Even in the coding world, managers mostly deal with other managers; it's the technical lead that prioritizes projects, sets up deadlines, etc.
Joanna
>
> At any rate, I take it that anyone who actually manages their own time,
> sets their own deadlines, gets their work done so that others depending
> on that work don't have to way is simply working for the mini
manager in
> their head?
Someone else responded, not sure who:
That's a good question, but I don't think it necessarily captures the full context of what I posted, in which three conditions were present: a boss who eliminates formal hierarchy, employees who are tasked with self-management, and new software which allows each of them to monitor all of their performances, and create peer-ratings which replace the formal hierarchies. The suggestion was that it is possible to frame such a system in less-than-glowing terms, of which "cultivation of your inner mini-manager combined with technologies of surveillance" was a facile and improvised example. Obviously it could be explored with greater depth.
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