A VC: The Management Team – Guest Post From Joel Spolsky:
The “management team” isn’t the “decision making” team. It’s a support function. You may want to call them administration instead of management, which will keep them from getting too big for their britches.
Administrators aren’t supposed to make the hard decisions. They don’t know enough. All those super genius computer scientists that you had to recruit from MIT at great expense are supposed to make the hard decisions. That’s why you’re paying them. Administrators exist to move the furniture around so that the people at the top of the tree can make the hard decisions.
When two engineers get into an argument about whether to use one big Flash SSD drive or several small SSD drives, do you really think the CEO is going to know better than the two line engineers, who have just spent three days arguing and researching and testing?
[Recently Joel was kind enough to have some of my team over for lunch and a tour of the FogCreek offices. It was great to see Joel again and it was interesting to see how well the design of the offices held up. I agree with the above completely. I’m there to help my team do what they need, not try and figure out everything myself. As Joel concluded… “It means hiring smart people who get things done—and then getting the hell out of the way.” I try to do just that every day.]
turnings :: daniel berlinger 