11 ms·

How to identify an immoral maze

186 points by apsec112 7y ago

cbanek 7y ago
I remember looking at this when I joined MSFT. I think I was 7 management links away from billg. And yes, many of the middle managers fought with each other constantly, not knowing what was actually happening on the coding level. We had these huge reorgs where all the middle managers would get shuffled, but almost all the ICs and their leads would be doing the same thing as always, maybe once every other year. Although this article leaves out that even in a flat organization, if you have people that have it out for you, or are trying to manipulate you, they are essentially building an immoral maze as well (and one that by design you will be found lacking).
- blowski 7y ago
  You’re absolutely right - I’d much rather work in a formal hierarchy than an informal one.
  - bartread 7y ago
    For those of you wondering why informal hierarchies can often be worse than formal hierarchies I offer an old but still very relevant essay by Jo Freeman, "The Tyranny of Structurelessness": https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
- AtlasBarfed 7y ago
  I once read that nerds never understood that popular people spent all their time being popular, while nerds actually were educating themselves. Likewise, middle management machiavellis spend all their time scheming for their promotion and enrichment, so any manager that is trying to "do good" will be stamped out because they just don't have the time to compete with full-time schemers. Eventually all managers of morality will be ejected from that organization.
npo9 7y ago
I’m unsure if how many layers deep alone is a good indicator of if it’s an immoral maze. I once worked with a company that had 50 employees and the hierarchy was five people deep. I once worked in a company with 10,000 employees and the hierarchy was six deep. The larger company with one more layer was much better.
- LanceH 7y ago
  There is probably some room for differentiation between a purely personnel layer and a product layer. If you have 5 people, you need someone who can provide a room and some computers. If you have 500 people, you need a layer that can provision a building. Personnel wise it makes sense to have another layer -- but it doesn't follow that the product itself needs another approval layer.
- dvirsky 7y ago
  Yes, the number of levels needs to be normalized by the size of the org (although probably some log of the size, it should not grow linearly, following the nature of an org tree). If one manager has around 5 direct reports on average, you need seven levels to span 80K employees. If a single manager has 10 direct reports you still need five levels to reach 100K (though I doubt there is a single 100K+ employee company that is only five levels deep)
LanceH 7y ago
I worked briefly for a very large company where the bulk of the effort was around supply chain management. The actual production of the product was simple and relatively solved long ago -- it was so much more about branding and distribution. Early on I started to wonder if any of the people I was working with had ever stepped foot in one of the warehouses we were managing software for; or met a user of that same software. The whole place was rife with consultants and contractors who had been working there for years upon years. I was there as a consultant (glorified contractor) and it quickly became apparent that I was there to be an evil consultant. The goal wasn't to produce the system they needed, it was to produce billable hours and ingratiate ourselves to the host such that we could land another project. We were using whole off-shore teams to do work which might have been done by one or two people locally. It was all about getting the margins on the highest headcount possible. For all of this, I was a BA, one layer off the "line" of people actually producing. The people above me only talked to other people who were neither buying the product nor producing it, exactly as the article describes. They were less interested in the product getting made than their ability to show that things were going well. I found (actual) work elsewhere. Half joking aside: this also reminds me of the java frameworks/architectures that got me to hate the language so much.
- superbrane 7y ago
  in many corporations of this kind it's all about: - over-billing the customer (see Acc. and their legendary $20-30M site that was not working) - internal power plays between managers who want to show-off managing as much headcount as possible, as that is correlated with paycheck etc. etc.
- chasd00 7y ago
  hah reminds me of the demotivator "Consulting, if you're not a part of the solution there's money to be made prolonging the problem" I'm in consulting and there is a lot of that. Especially in big companies on big projects where entire teams can hide and just bill hours and a deliverable never materializes. The consultants have no emotional investment in the client and so as long as the invoices are paid no one is going to care. Now, withhold payment until milestones are met or the deliverable is in production and everyone gets much more interested in productivity.
pmiller2 7y ago
Based on the article, it looks like the fundamental problem is lack of "skin in the game," and the author notes it as a defense against becoming an immoral maze. But, how can one identify "skin in the game," particularly 2+ levels of the hierarchy above oneself?
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  A core implication of the article's thesis is that it's very hard in general. Otherwise, the owners of any organization would just issue an order saying "everyone's gotta have skin in the game". (In fact they do try to issue that order; a typical corporate middle manager will get quite a bit of their compensation from performance-based programs and company stock they're culturally discouraged from selling.)
  - pmiller2 7y ago
    That doesn’t quite get at what I’m saying. I’m claiming that “skin in the game” is not really something an individual employee can identify organization wide. And, if it’s not possible to determine whether your boss’s boss has “skin in the game,” it’s a useless construct for determining whether a given organization is an immoral maze, regardless of its causal role.
nathan_compton 7y ago
What is disturbing to me about the idea of having skin in the game is that I really struggle to imagine a work situation in which I would even _want_ to have skin in the game. Skin in the game means responsibility at some personal level, and the absence of that personal responsibility is precisely the nice thing (perhaps the only nice thing) about wage labor.
- awb 7y ago
  Right. Immoral is a loaded term. Some might like and seek out these mazes. Digging holes and filling them back up might not help humanity progress, but it probably doesn't have much stress either.
  - Raemon777 7y ago
    The point is less about the bullshit-job nature, and more about how the job warps you as a person (i.e. to make it to upper management, you end up having to do unethical things, and rearrange your life/hobbies/etc to be the things that get you ahead)
  - coliveira 7y ago
    You would be surprise in how much stress there is doing pointless jobs! It is not easy at all, at least from a psychological point of view.
- chasd00 7y ago
  yeah "responsibility at some personal level" is very _very_ expensive in my book. The compensation would have to be extraordinary.
- awinter-py 7y ago
  responsibility sucks I'll agree, but autonomy and profit participation are cool
  - nathan_compton 7y ago
    I wish I could join a cooperative which could afford to pay my current salary.
dfraser992 7y ago
I wonder if the writers of HBO's Succession have read this series of web page? I have only glanced at a few pages TBH, but this immediately came to mind.
bryanrasmussen 7y ago
The suggestion of not having anything to do with these mazes is in effect a suggestion not to have anything to do with any extremely successful company as far as I can figure out - so, at what monetary point will a company become a maze?
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  It's not at a monetary point. It's usually when the company has succeeded to the point that it's not in danger of failing, even if inefficiency sets in. Once it reaches that point, then it's a matter of how long it takes the culture to rot. (Most cultures rot eventually.) I wonder if "immoral maze" explains our politics as well, and if it has the same cause. The US hasn't been in danger of failing, even if the government became insanely inefficient.
chadash 7y ago
Number of levels in the hierarchy seems like a bad way to determine this. I've worked in a company with 500 employees (and three levels) and lots of bureaucracy and a company with 100,000+ employees (~6-8 levels depending on your division) with relatively little bureaucracy (yes, on occasion, I ran in to bad cases of it, but it didn't effect my day-to-day work). It's simply not possible to have 100,000+ employees and less than 6 levels, unless you have managers with tons of employees. But it is possible to be in a division of a large company where your group has relative autonomy and are empowered to do what they need to do. In my case, there were about 20 of us inside of a larger 500 person group. 95% of decisions were made within the 20 person group (obviously this is an approximation). Another 4% were made at the 500 person group management level. 1% were made by company-wide executives. In other words, my boss was accountable for most of what we did. On occasion, he's need to go to his boss for something. And very rarely, his boss would need to escalate to higher ups (where there were another 3 or 4 levels to the CEO). This company was very well run, but there are much smaller companies with fewer levels in the hierarchy and lots more bureaucracy.
- awinter-py 7y ago
  would be interesting to see some AI-assisted version of holacracy replace middle managers -- you'd still have low-level team leads and high-level strategy people, but a lot of the informational glue and project updates could be taken over by machines you'd need to go into a project like that (1) believing that middle managers eventually suppress more value than they add and (2) you're okay operating in a random mix of cowboy team leads and inconsistent organizational glue between them. you'd set broad parameters like 'don't over-duplicate work', 'pick projects that are more or less on-topic with our company', 'get third party verification of plans and estimates'. Firing could be some mix of 'future needs', performance and random. Moving teams would happen based on an internal market of skills & personnel budget. might be chaos but it could be fun.
  - Matticus_Rex 7y ago
    I've been really interested to watch what Holacracy actually does (sans AI) in healthy, agile companies. A lot of the management overhead gets cut (while keeping functional management of the company, though a lot of it becomes process rather than people), and a lot of the projected issues are just things someone can propose a solution for and get it enacted via Holacracy governance. Springest is a really interesting example. Very anti-bullshit culture, rigid focus on OKRs and efficiency, and yet they're extremely light-hearted and lack the political crap most similarly high-performing companies have. Maybe AI makes it better in the long run, but I'm a believer already.
commandlinefan 7y ago
> A world without slack is not a place one wants to be. My first thought was, “no, I’d love to be able to delete the damned thing” and then I realized he wasn’t talking about the chat app…
- AdmiralGinge 7y ago
  Whatever problems IRC created, I really doubt the best solution was an exercise in why we need to be more liberal with the word "bloatware".
eddywebs 7y ago
I was in an immoral maze once, had I read this article before I might have still been there (for good reasons).
AtlasBarfed 7y ago
Are there large revenue rich organizations that are NOT immoral mazes? It's like democracy being the worst form of government, except all the others.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > Are there large revenue rich organizations that are NOT immoral mazes? Because both depth of organization and (the author doesn't point to this, but it's my experience of the effect the author describes) span of control contribute to the effect, there aren't large organizations beyond a certain size (independent of revenue) that aren't immoral mazes. You can balance depth and span to mitigate the problem, but limiting organization size is the only way to actually avoid it.
jrochkind1 7y ago
I feel so seen.
alexashka 7y ago
There are a lot of words here. Isn't it simply a matter of humans being simpletons and not meant to take into account complex phenomena such as the good for millions if not billions of people? Most everyone I know only thought about themselves and a few thought philosophically about others but lacked experience, until they had kids. With kids, they started thinking about their kids' success so they started to care the minimum amount to get their kids into good neighbourhoods, schools, etc. That's the extent of most people I know, most of whom are University graduates - I can only imagine people without higher education thinking even less or parroting what they heard on tv. Given that people are this simple, 'immortal mazes' are just a natural consequence of our make-up. If we want to live in big cities and work in offices with hundreds of people, many of whom keep changing jobs, we're not going to achieve communities and the good things that come with them.
Jamwinner 7y ago
I see a lot of comments saying they would be afraid of skin in the game. I ask those who feel that way; why on earth would you work every day toward something you don't see yourself in, breathe and beleive in? That sounds utterly soul-crushing to fear the one thing that gives work meaning.
- progman32 7y ago
  Some don't have a choice. Some find meaning elsewhere, for example some see a job as simply a means to provide for their family. If a job is just a job, switching jobs for greener pastures becomes easier. Perhaps putting their family's interests before their own also becomes easier (how many stories of founders having family issues have you heard?). It's a question of priorities. Being personally invested in a company has risks and advantages. I've seen people tolerate a lot of nastiness from their employer because the victim "believes in the mission". I for one have to watch my tendency to get attached to "missions," lest I lose too much self-determination capacity.
- pmiller2 7y ago
  Because I require money to purchase goods and services.
- louis8799 7y ago
  When you have debt to serve, kids to feed, wouldn't you want to blame someone else when you fxxked up your work? Human, all too human.
- yibg 7y ago
  So I can have money to enjoy my time outside of work.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- anentropic 7y ago
  > why on earth would you work every day toward something you don't see yourself in, breathe and beleive in? because the work itself was intrinsicly interesting, regardless of the product
ironman1478 7y ago
Unless skin in the game counts as accountability, then that's definitely missing from the list. My previous employer had zero accountability for the people above the software engineers who implemented things and unfortunately these people made all the decisions. You'd have architects and PMs who had all these terrible ideas, tell people to implement these terrible ideas and then blame the engineers when things didn't work. So dumb.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
mnemonicsloth 7y ago
It's true that hierarchy is bad, but I don't see why it was necessary to spend 1500 words in saying so. He also misses something big: your relationship with your boss is more important than the shape of your organization. A good boss can shield you from official weirdness, even in an organization 20 layers deep. A bad boss can turn any working arrangement toxic very quickly, even in a company completely devoid of hierarchy.
Rury 7y ago
These seem contradictory to me: >For sufficiently large organizations, as described in Moral Mazes, skin in the game is not so much spread thin as deliberately destroyed. >Mazes systematically erase all slack
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  Holding someone to their promises strictly is not the same thing as having stakes. It's used as an equivalent to area denial weapon - time spent being listed with work is time you do not get to challenge the immediate superiors or peers. The work does not have to be related to company goals. Since the work gets pushed down, ultimately rank and file workers get screwed the most.

186 points by apsec112 7y ago

I remember looking at this when I joined MSFT. I think I was 7 management links away from billg. And yes, many of the middle managers fought with each other constantly, not knowing what was actually happening on the coding level. We had these huge reorgs where all the middle managers would get shuffled, but almost all the ICs and their leads would be doing the same thing as always, maybe once every other year. Although this article leaves out that even in a flat organization, if you have people that have it out for you, or are trying to manipulate you, they are essentially building an immoral maze as well (and one that by design you will be found lacking).

blowski 7y ago
You’re absolutely right - I’d much rather work in a formal hierarchy than an informal one.
- bartread 7y ago
  For those of you wondering why informal hierarchies can often be worse than formal hierarchies I offer an old but still very relevant essay by Jo Freeman, "The Tyranny of Structurelessness": https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
AtlasBarfed 7y ago
I once read that nerds never understood that popular people spent all their time being popular, while nerds actually were educating themselves. Likewise, middle management machiavellis spend all their time scheming for their promotion and enrichment, so any manager that is trying to "do good" will be stamped out because they just don't have the time to compete with full-time schemers. Eventually all managers of morality will be ejected from that organization.

npo9 7y ago

I’m unsure if how many layers deep alone is a good indicator of if it’s an immoral maze. I once worked with a company that had 50 employees and the hierarchy was five people deep. I once worked in a company with 10,000 employees and the hierarchy was six deep. The larger company with one more layer was much better.

LanceH 7y ago
There is probably some room for differentiation between a purely personnel layer and a product layer. If you have 5 people, you need someone who can provide a room and some computers. If you have 500 people, you need a layer that can provision a building. Personnel wise it makes sense to have another layer -- but it doesn't follow that the product itself needs another approval layer.
dvirsky 7y ago
Yes, the number of levels needs to be normalized by the size of the org (although probably some log of the size, it should not grow linearly, following the nature of an org tree). If one manager has around 5 direct reports on average, you need seven levels to span 80K employees. If a single manager has 10 direct reports you still need five levels to reach 100K (though I doubt there is a single 100K+ employee company that is only five levels deep)

LanceH 7y ago

I worked briefly for a very large company where the bulk of the effort was around supply chain management. The actual production of the product was simple and relatively solved long ago -- it was so much more about branding and distribution. Early on I started to wonder if any of the people I was working with had ever stepped foot in one of the warehouses we were managing software for; or met a user of that same software. The whole place was rife with consultants and contractors who had been working there for years upon years. I was there as a consultant (glorified contractor) and it quickly became apparent that I was there to be an evil consultant. The goal wasn't to produce the system they needed, it was to produce billable hours and ingratiate ourselves to the host such that we could land another project. We were using whole off-shore teams to do work which might have been done by one or two people locally. It was all about getting the margins on the highest headcount possible. For all of this, I was a BA, one layer off the "line" of people actually producing. The people above me only talked to other people who were neither buying the product nor producing it, exactly as the article describes. They were less interested in the product getting made than their ability to show that things were going well. I found (actual) work elsewhere. Half joking aside: this also reminds me of the java frameworks/architectures that got me to hate the language so much.

superbrane 7y ago
in many corporations of this kind it's all about: - over-billing the customer (see Acc. and their legendary $20-30M site that was not working) - internal power plays between managers who want to show-off managing as much headcount as possible, as that is correlated with paycheck etc. etc.
chasd00 7y ago
hah reminds me of the demotivator "Consulting, if you're not a part of the solution there's money to be made prolonging the problem" I'm in consulting and there is a lot of that. Especially in big companies on big projects where entire teams can hide and just bill hours and a deliverable never materializes. The consultants have no emotional investment in the client and so as long as the invoices are paid no one is going to care. Now, withhold payment until milestones are met or the deliverable is in production and everyone gets much more interested in productivity.

pmiller2 7y ago

Based on the article, it looks like the fundamental problem is lack of "skin in the game," and the author notes it as a defense against becoming an immoral maze. But, how can one identify "skin in the game," particularly 2+ levels of the hierarchy above oneself?

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
A core implication of the article's thesis is that it's very hard in general. Otherwise, the owners of any organization would just issue an order saying "everyone's gotta have skin in the game". (In fact they do try to issue that order; a typical corporate middle manager will get quite a bit of their compensation from performance-based programs and company stock they're culturally discouraged from selling.)
- pmiller2 7y ago
  That doesn’t quite get at what I’m saying. I’m claiming that “skin in the game” is not really something an individual employee can identify organization wide. And, if it’s not possible to determine whether your boss’s boss has “skin in the game,” it’s a useless construct for determining whether a given organization is an immoral maze, regardless of its causal role.

nathan_compton 7y ago

What is disturbing to me about the idea of having skin in the game is that I really struggle to imagine a work situation in which I would even _want_ to have skin in the game. Skin in the game means responsibility at some personal level, and the absence of that personal responsibility is precisely the nice thing (perhaps the only nice thing) about wage labor.

awb 7y ago
Right. Immoral is a loaded term. Some might like and seek out these mazes. Digging holes and filling them back up might not help humanity progress, but it probably doesn't have much stress either.
- Raemon777 7y ago
  The point is less about the bullshit-job nature, and more about how the job warps you as a person (i.e. to make it to upper management, you end up having to do unethical things, and rearrange your life/hobbies/etc to be the things that get you ahead)
- coliveira 7y ago
  You would be surprise in how much stress there is doing pointless jobs! It is not easy at all, at least from a psychological point of view.
chasd00 7y ago
yeah "responsibility at some personal level" is very _very_ expensive in my book. The compensation would have to be extraordinary.
awinter-py 7y ago
responsibility sucks I'll agree, but autonomy and profit participation are cool
- nathan_compton 7y ago
  I wish I could join a cooperative which could afford to pay my current salary.

dfraser992 7y ago

I wonder if the writers of HBO's Succession have read this series of web page? I have only glanced at a few pages TBH, but this immediately came to mind.

bryanrasmussen 7y ago

The suggestion of not having anything to do with these mazes is in effect a suggestion not to have anything to do with any extremely successful company as far as I can figure out - so, at what monetary point will a company become a maze?

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
It's not at a monetary point. It's usually when the company has succeeded to the point that it's not in danger of failing, even if inefficiency sets in. Once it reaches that point, then it's a matter of how long it takes the culture to rot. (Most cultures rot eventually.) I wonder if "immoral maze" explains our politics as well, and if it has the same cause. The US hasn't been in danger of failing, even if the government became insanely inefficient.

chadash 7y ago

Number of levels in the hierarchy seems like a bad way to determine this. I've worked in a company with 500 employees (and three levels) and lots of bureaucracy and a company with 100,000+ employees (~6-8 levels depending on your division) with relatively little bureaucracy (yes, on occasion, I ran in to bad cases of it, but it didn't effect my day-to-day work). It's simply not possible to have 100,000+ employees and less than 6 levels, unless you have managers with tons of employees. But it is possible to be in a division of a large company where your group has relative autonomy and are empowered to do what they need to do. In my case, there were about 20 of us inside of a larger 500 person group. 95% of decisions were made within the 20 person group (obviously this is an approximation). Another 4% were made at the 500 person group management level. 1% were made by company-wide executives. In other words, my boss was accountable for most of what we did. On occasion, he's need to go to his boss for something. And very rarely, his boss would need to escalate to higher ups (where there were another 3 or 4 levels to the CEO). This company was very well run, but there are much smaller companies with fewer levels in the hierarchy and lots more bureaucracy.

awinter-py 7y ago
would be interesting to see some AI-assisted version of holacracy replace middle managers -- you'd still have low-level team leads and high-level strategy people, but a lot of the informational glue and project updates could be taken over by machines you'd need to go into a project like that (1) believing that middle managers eventually suppress more value than they add and (2) you're okay operating in a random mix of cowboy team leads and inconsistent organizational glue between them. you'd set broad parameters like 'don't over-duplicate work', 'pick projects that are more or less on-topic with our company', 'get third party verification of plans and estimates'. Firing could be some mix of 'future needs', performance and random. Moving teams would happen based on an internal market of skills & personnel budget. might be chaos but it could be fun.
- Matticus_Rex 7y ago
  I've been really interested to watch what Holacracy actually does (sans AI) in healthy, agile companies. A lot of the management overhead gets cut (while keeping functional management of the company, though a lot of it becomes process rather than people), and a lot of the projected issues are just things someone can propose a solution for and get it enacted via Holacracy governance. Springest is a really interesting example. Very anti-bullshit culture, rigid focus on OKRs and efficiency, and yet they're extremely light-hearted and lack the political crap most similarly high-performing companies have. Maybe AI makes it better in the long run, but I'm a believer already.

commandlinefan 7y ago

> A world without slack is not a place one wants to be. My first thought was, “no, I’d love to be able to delete the damned thing” and then I realized he wasn’t talking about the chat app…

AdmiralGinge 7y ago
Whatever problems IRC created, I really doubt the best solution was an exercise in why we need to be more liberal with the word "bloatware".

eddywebs 7y ago

I was in an immoral maze once, had I read this article before I might have still been there (for good reasons).

AtlasBarfed 7y ago

Are there large revenue rich organizations that are NOT immoral mazes? It's like democracy being the worst form of government, except all the others.

dragonwriter 7y ago
> Are there large revenue rich organizations that are NOT immoral mazes? Because both depth of organization and (the author doesn't point to this, but it's my experience of the effect the author describes) span of control contribute to the effect, there aren't large organizations beyond a certain size (independent of revenue) that aren't immoral mazes. You can balance depth and span to mitigate the problem, but limiting organization size is the only way to actually avoid it.

jrochkind1 7y ago

I feel so seen.

alexashka 7y ago

There are a lot of words here. Isn't it simply a matter of humans being simpletons and not meant to take into account complex phenomena such as the good for millions if not billions of people? Most everyone I know only thought about themselves and a few thought philosophically about others but lacked experience, until they had kids. With kids, they started thinking about their kids' success so they started to care the minimum amount to get their kids into good neighbourhoods, schools, etc. That's the extent of most people I know, most of whom are University graduates - I can only imagine people without higher education thinking even less or parroting what they heard on tv. Given that people are this simple, 'immortal mazes' are just a natural consequence of our make-up. If we want to live in big cities and work in offices with hundreds of people, many of whom keep changing jobs, we're not going to achieve communities and the good things that come with them.

Jamwinner 7y ago

I see a lot of comments saying they would be afraid of skin in the game. I ask those who feel that way; why on earth would you work every day toward something you don't see yourself in, breathe and beleive in? That sounds utterly soul-crushing to fear the one thing that gives work meaning.

progman32 7y ago
Some don't have a choice. Some find meaning elsewhere, for example some see a job as simply a means to provide for their family. If a job is just a job, switching jobs for greener pastures becomes easier. Perhaps putting their family's interests before their own also becomes easier (how many stories of founders having family issues have you heard?). It's a question of priorities. Being personally invested in a company has risks and advantages. I've seen people tolerate a lot of nastiness from their employer because the victim "believes in the mission". I for one have to watch my tendency to get attached to "missions," lest I lose too much self-determination capacity.
pmiller2 7y ago
Because I require money to purchase goods and services.
louis8799 7y ago
When you have debt to serve, kids to feed, wouldn't you want to blame someone else when you fxxked up your work? Human, all too human.
yibg 7y ago
So I can have money to enjoy my time outside of work.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
anentropic 7y ago
> why on earth would you work every day toward something you don't see yourself in, breathe and beleive in? because the work itself was intrinsicly interesting, regardless of the product

ironman1478 7y ago

Unless skin in the game counts as accountability, then that's definitely missing from the list. My previous employer had zero accountability for the people above the software engineers who implemented things and unfortunately these people made all the decisions. You'd have architects and PMs who had all these terrible ideas, tell people to implement these terrible ideas and then blame the engineers when things didn't work. So dumb.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

mnemonicsloth 7y ago

It's true that hierarchy is bad, but I don't see why it was necessary to spend 1500 words in saying so. He also misses something big: your relationship with your boss is more important than the shape of your organization. A good boss can shield you from official weirdness, even in an organization 20 layers deep. A bad boss can turn any working arrangement toxic very quickly, even in a company completely devoid of hierarchy.

Rury 7y ago

These seem contradictory to me: >For sufficiently large organizations, as described in Moral Mazes, skin in the game is not so much spread thin as deliberately destroyed. >Mazes systematically erase all slack

AstralStorm 7y ago
Holding someone to their promises strictly is not the same thing as having stakes. It's used as an equivalent to area denial weapon - time spent being listed with work is time you do not get to challenge the immediate superiors or peers. The work does not have to be related to company goals. Since the work gets pushed down, ultimately rank and file workers get screwed the most.