Re: Do I Really Need A Supervisor?

[dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Graham says

<<Strong perhaps.  Numerous probably not.  Otherwise decisions much go
through too many levels and too many ``adjustments''.  Certainly when
your administrative staff outnumbers your programmers, you have a very
big problem.  More generally, when the overseers outnumber the
workers, large problems occur.  Unfortunately, this situation is far
more common than people give credit for.

I believe Parkinson had it right, in _Parkinson's_Law_and_Other_Studies_
_in_Administration_.  Administration grows without bound, and without
regard to the amount of work being done.>>

Well I certainly agree that having too many management types around is
a big problem, but I am not sure that it is the biggest problem. In my
experience, the too-many-people syndrome is most serious at the technical
level. There are lots of projects where 90 low level people are desperately
struggling to do a bad job of implementing a system which 10 really good
people could do in a fraction of the time.

Very often this is the result of a beaurocratic structure which has no
problem in hiring hundreds of people and paying them $50,000, but recoils
in horror at the idea of replacing dozens of such low level people with
one really competent person and paying them what they are worth.

I certainly see this phenomenon at work in negotiating T&M rates with
the government. Very often you are in the position of saying:
if we charge $50 an hour, then we need to do this with low level people,
and the total cost will be $x. If we charge $200 an hour, then we can
do this with competent people and the charge will be $y. But often the
govt will prefer the $50 to the $200, even if $x is way bigger than $y.
Why is this choice made -- well obviously to hold costs down, $200 is
much too much! :-)