Here's how it felt to be a manager in tech during [ZIRP](https://www.readmargins.com/p/zirp-explains-the-world) (2008-2022): 1. It's hard to make hires. But it's easy to get headcount. 2. Every so often, your high performer gets an offer from a competitor, and can double his comp ("compensation" gets brought up often enough that we have to shorten it to "comp"). 3. Internal teams can poach your team members at any time. 4. You're pressured to "scale yourself". 5. You read Adam Grant and Daniel Pink about autonomy and mastery. 6. After COVID, your team expects to come into office twice a week max. It's all a direct result of ZIRP: there was explosive growth in tech, we had the luxury to think of long time-horizons, and demand for labor drastically outstripped the supply. With these pressures, managers steered as clear as possible from micromanagement. Which made sense! Software development *is* a [[Cynefin model|complex environment]] which *does* benefit from [[Nudges not dictation|nudges]], and autonomy especially in the long term. ![[Headcount2.jpg]] *Pictured: SWE Manager II (soon to be promoted to III), circa 2018* ### Losing the supervision muscle But it went beyond that: managers were reluctant to [[Managers need to Whitebox|whitebox]] because we dreaded losing talent, and we preferred to spend the time on "scaling". Efficiency wasn't a concern: if work in your team is not getting done as fast as needed, why not just [[Every organism wants to grow|get more head count]]? To be clear, most managers weren't consciously manipulating the system - the [[Goal Displacement|incentive to scale]] created the complacency. Also this *wasn't* all managers, all the time. But it *was* the zeitgeist, and most of us fell prey to it at some point or another. Part of my [[House Cats vs Street Cats - What I had to unlearn to become a Founder|street cat]] evolution was about letting some of these conceptions go. [Founder Mode](https://paulgraham.com/foundermode.html) is a backlash to all of this. this. Brian Chesky couldn't give that speech in 2019 because of the labor market dynamics. By the end of 2022 though, the tides have turned. Money was tight, efficiency was back in, and we had to consider both axes of the [[Production vs People Grid]]. #published 2025-02-23