Well then you are mistaken in your characterization of this not being work.

Replying to emails and sitting in meetings thinking of the best way to tell other people how to do the actual work isn't work, no.

Oh I forgot - we give the people who do this control over the employment of the people who do the actual work. Very weird system.

I'm not sure what's more unsettling to me: That we have managers here who believe that reading emails and sitting in meetings is considered contributing and making an actual difference... Or that HN has this many managers on it who apparently really cannot code or directly contribute alongside their team; yet are posting on a more technical forum, on a regular basis. Strange. Guess it's like a hockey fan who watches every game but has never laced up skates themselves.

Former manager here - you'd be very surprised at how much effort it takes to act as a human shield for your developers to keep the interruptions to a minimum and keep their roadmap stable. It's work, and it can be delicate. Try running interference with a company president who wants to bother your developers when they're trying to get something out the door, or trying to make sure stupid ideas die before they become your team's problem.

Why do people keep saying that managers solve the problem of existing in the same company as other managers as though that’s a compelling point?

And yet one that billions of people participate in. You are either a genius of epic proportions or just wrong in your thinking here. As long as people in coordinated groups get more done than individuals, I believe you are wrong.

People in coordinated groups do not necessarily require someone to sit around in meetings and send emails telling the rest of them what to do.

Btw, I never said “telling the rest of them what to do.” That is a complete misconception of management, at least the way I believe the best managers practice it. I only get involved in decisions that my team has been unable to make themselves. Even then, I rarely find myself having to be the decider. My role is to facilitate a good decision, not to tell people what to do. The team looks to me for prioritization and providing context, not to top-down manage them.

How is coordination achieved otherwise?

The other guy is definitely a bit jumpy and as a programmer I can't agree with him (fully) but that part of your comments stood out to me:

> And yet one that billions of people participate in.

Most of humanity participated in slavery for a long time as well. A lot of Europe's city dwellers enjoyed watching the hanging of criminals at dawn or sun-down, too. People also developed the mass habit of accusing a neighbor they don't like for being a witch and were hoping to have them burned (because the neighbor's chicken pecked your watermelon seeds or whatever; yeah, people are that petty).

Appealing to statistics and what the majority does is missing the point of the big power imbalances that are sadly one of the constants in every human society or system.

It doesn't help that many programmers are rather introverted and prefer passive resistance as opposed to having a good and informative one-on-one meeting, of course. And many managers are stuck in the unenviable position of having to develop skills to extract valuable actionable info from introverted people who prefer to sabotage them behind their backs. I recognize that and I sympathize.

But the inconvenient truth is, and one many managers forget about all the time, is that most of us have zero decision power -- which is quite the shame because we need it in no small amount of situations.

Formulas like Scrum (or anything "agile" really) are a complete and pathetic joke. The process must adapt to the task at hand. The best performing teams I've been in had zero process -- they only had some 10-15 ground rules like "if you are stuck for more than a day please raise the issue with the rest of the team; nobody will think you're stupid, we'll only try to unblock you". Whatever needed to be done, we used our own breed of process that best served it. On the rare occasions Scrum was actually useful btw. Most of the time the schema was more or less "enable your ICs, actively seek to unblock them, then leave them the hell alone, they know what they're doing".

You alluded to (in another comment) that you don't make the decisions; that you facilitate the people to arrive at the right decision. Kudos to you but you should still recognize that you're the minority, sadly.

Most programmers are forced to work with managers whose ego is easily bruised. That's a fact of life, one that can't be fixed by going to another job because the odds are at least 90% that it will be the same there as well.

So yeah, there are problems on both sides, that's unquestionable. I mostly went on to rant about how appealing to statistics is a poor strategy to evaluate if a given system is good (which doesn't at all explain how many companies started getting more bang for their buck after they moved to a 4-day working week btw; among other examples).

I undoubtedly compressed too much into too few sentences. My allusion to genius||wrong is raising exactly this concern. How do you decide which? For me in this argument it comes down to results. Why do people organize in this way? As I stated,I believe groups get more done than individuals and that coordinating those groups becomes the central feature of management. It can be done poorly or well, but if it facilitates the group being more productive than an individual it is superior from a pragmatic perspective.