The Middle-Manager Rotation: A Modest Proposal, Or Possibly A DevOps Parable

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2024-09-20 00:00:07

If we think the on-call rotation is working well and is an efficient use of personnel, I’d like to propose we fire all the middle-managers and replace the current management structure with an analogous “middle-manager rotation.”

My team’s developers spend—on average—about one day each month on-call for our products, and have about a month between their on-call shifts. We don’t currently have any full-time SREs assigned to respond to incidents for the product we’re building, work on observability, follow up on post-mortems, or other operational tasks.

We could just as logically have each developer spend about one day/month as a director or VP, and likewise eliminate those positions.1 This would help level-up management skills amongst the team, give everyone an appreciation for middle-management’s role, and also save the company a bunch of money on payroll. The line managers could form a backup rotation, in case someone on the primary rotation is unavailable for their scheduled shift or is unable to respond to an email from the CEO within 15 minutes.

Of course, there are some reasons why this may not be the most efficient or logical way to structure an organization. I’ll address a few possible objections here:

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