David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

Let me program, and then I'll come up for air.

I'll talk with other programmers who I can spar with, that we can learn something with, I can turn the problems over with, and we can move forward.

If you look back on the history of computer industry, all the great innovation that's happened, it's all been done by tiny teams with no engineering managers, just full of highly skilled individuals.

You've had John Carmichael here,

I used to look up to id Software so much, not just because I loved Quake, not just because I loved what they were doing, but because he shared a bit about how the company worked.

There were no managers, or maybe they had one business guy doing some business stuff, but that was just to get paid.

Everything else was basically just designers and programmers, and there were about eight of them, and they created a goddamn Quake 2.

So why do you need all these people again?

Why do you need all these managers again?

I think, again, at a certain scale, it does break down.

It's hard to just have 100,000 programmers running around wild without any product mommies or daddies telling them what to do.

I understand that.

And then, even as I say that, I also don't understand it.

Because if you look at something like Gmail, for example, that was like a side project done by Boucher at Google at the time.

So much of the enduring long-term value of even all these huge companies were created by people who didn't have a goddamn manager.

And that's not an accident.

That's a direct cause and effect.

So I've turned in some way even more militant over the years against this notion of management, at least for myself and knowing who I am and how I want to work.

Because the other part of this is I don't want to be a manager.

And maybe this is just me projecting the fact that I'm an introvert who don't like to talk to people on one-on-one calls every week.