Why Are So Many Zappos Employees Leaving?
I assume this keeps popping up on Hacker News because of schadenfreude, but I&#x27;m going to say something controversial (and from a completely uninformed viewpoint), and that&#x27;s &quot;good riddance&quot;. Of all the managers I&#x27;ve ever had, maybe 1 or 2 of them have been any good at it. And by good at it, I mean they made me better at my job. All the other managers I&#x27;ve ever dealt with succeeded primarily in making my job harder to do.<p>Good managers are glorified butlers. Their job is to do everything and anything they can to accommodate those whom they manage, and recognize that because they aren&#x27;t actually creating anything, they defer to those who can and do whatever they can to help them do it. If they came from a creator position, then their main challenge is to not forget what it was like to be a creator and advocate for them as though they still are.<p>One of the major problems with the whole concept of managers is that they are typically higher than the creators in the corporate hierarchy, and often get corrupted by that. They are proud to be managers because it&#x27;s a promotion in most organizations, but they have to deal with the uncomfortable fact that they no longer actually <i>make</i> anything (or never did to begin with). Thus, they try to find other ways to make themselves feel valuable, and that often involves inventing extra work for the creators to do.<p>If I ran a company, managers would be butlers. Their compensation would be directly tied to the level of happiness of the creators they are serving. I might even let the creators they serve set their salaries. I currently have a manager whose salary I would set higher than my own because he completely embodies this type of management style. If anybody on the team needs anything, he does it with a smile. He is our advocate, our cheerleader, our mediator, our friend, and our faithful servant. It&#x27;s not a coincidence he&#x27;s gotten employee of the year (based on embodying corporate values) two years in a row.<p>I really appreciate what Zappos is doing here and I sincerely hope it works out. The worst thing that could happen is they lose their resolve and give up on it. That would be a very unfortunate signal to the rest of corporate America that the status quo is working just fine, and it would make me very sad indeed.