This is nice.
My favourite section:
“There’s no management when we’re three people. There’s no management when we’re 15 people. We still don’t have any managers hired in 37signals. Every single one of us are producers.
I’m still a producer. I still write code. Jason still designs. We still do all the stuff and management is sort of the offshoot of, “Oh, yeah. Sometimes we have to deal with issues that they come up.”
Problem is when you have actual managers, whose sole job it is just to manage, they make up [stuff] to manage because you’ve got to fill an eight-hour day.
And in the beginning, there’s 40 minutes of management every three days. That’s what you need for management. You do not need eight hours of management, which is how you get policies and all this other bull that crops up when people don’t have anything to do.
Idle managers are absolutely the worst.”
– http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2351
(this is cut-and-paste from the transcript so I can’t remember what particular exploitive they are editing when they say [stuff])