Managers already do the bulk of interpretive labor though
Why should I believe this? One manager typically manages multiple people, so at first I’d expect that each employee spends much more time interpreting their manager than their manager spends interpreting them. Remember that some of the manager’s time will also be spent interpreting their manager, which competes with time spent interpreting their employees.
I wonder if this is in part a representativeness heuristic problem. Because managers have to control the behavior of so many other people, they may end up spending nearly all of their time doing interpretive labor, whereas managed people have to interface with their object-level tasks much of the time. So interpretive labor is a more characteristic activity for a manager. But this is a response to the underlying dynamic where the many-to-one relationship between managers and managed makes managerial interpretive labor scarce. Interpretive labor is characteristic of managers because they have less total capacity to do it per subordinate than their subordinates do per manager, not more.
each employee spends much more time interpreting their manager than their manager spends interpreting them
Agree about the time ratio. But interpretive labor of managers is more efficient per time spent, because they specialize in people, while programmers specialize in computers. For example, if you want to present a new project to superiors or partners, a good manager can craft the right communication in a day, where a brilliant programmer could spin their wheels for a week and in the end the message would fall flat. The same is true for manager-programmer conversations I’ve seen, managers are far better at reading them and it comes from skill, not position. That’s why I say programmers have more room for growth.
Managers already do the bulk of interpretive labor though. And too often programmers just yawn when the conversation turns to business stuff.
Why should I believe this? One manager typically manages multiple people, so at first I’d expect that each employee spends much more time interpreting their manager than their manager spends interpreting them. Remember that some of the manager’s time will also be spent interpreting their manager, which competes with time spent interpreting their employees.
I wonder if this is in part a representativeness heuristic problem. Because managers have to control the behavior of so many other people, they may end up spending nearly all of their time doing interpretive labor, whereas managed people have to interface with their object-level tasks much of the time. So interpretive labor is a more characteristic activity for a manager. But this is a response to the underlying dynamic where the many-to-one relationship between managers and managed makes managerial interpretive labor scarce. Interpretive labor is characteristic of managers because they have less total capacity to do it per subordinate than their subordinates do per manager, not more.
Agree about the time ratio. But interpretive labor of managers is more efficient per time spent, because they specialize in people, while programmers specialize in computers. For example, if you want to present a new project to superiors or partners, a good manager can craft the right communication in a day, where a brilliant programmer could spin their wheels for a week and in the end the message would fall flat. The same is true for manager-programmer conversations I’ve seen, managers are far better at reading them and it comes from skill, not position. That’s why I say programmers have more room for growth.