3 ms·

Can you elaborate on this comment? Based on your comments elsewhere I think we're likely to be largely in agreement. I tend to have a love/hate relationship wi

Can you elaborate on this comment? Based on your comments elsewhere I think we're likely to be largely in agreement. I tend to have a love/hate relationship with Conway's Law, spending half my time thinking about how to design stuff assuming it, and half my time trying to design stuff (unsuccessfully) to make it go away.

hinkley 5y ago
A lot of pain comes from taking a “concern” that doesn’t align with the org chart, making simple tasks take weeks to accomplish because I need to get my boss to tell your boss to do it anyway or we don’t make payroll. People tend to get precious about things they own. See also the legal department or the financial department thinking they are the company, as if they had any revenue without all of those “cost centers” or legal liabilities.
- akkartik 5y ago
  Yeah, I agree with this. There's a larger context here of capitalism evolving firms because they're more efficient, even though they dilute the price-communication value of markets to some extent. As a consequence your boss and my boss are talking about something that might affect millions of people. That results in an effect akin to regulatory capture. So one way to view my case against division of labor is as a case for pushing intelligence to the edges, as close as possible to the owner of the computer running the software. On this larger level my suggestions are not actually that radical. Capitalism has had a long trend to push intelligence down to the edges. Kings used to use hierarchy to push decisions down. Blitzkrieg was largely about creating an organization that pushes decision-making down. And we've been getting better at it. I think we (i.e. society) can be even better at it by pushing decision-making out of the org and towards the people using it.

3 ms·

Can you elaborate on this comment? Based on your comments elsewhere I think we're likely to be largely in agreement. I tend to have a love/hate relationship wi

by akkartik 5y ago

hinkley 5y ago
A lot of pain comes from taking a “concern” that doesn’t align with the org chart, making simple tasks take weeks to accomplish because I need to get my boss to tell your boss to do it anyway or we don’t make payroll. People tend to get precious about things they own. See also the legal department or the financial department thinking they are the company, as if they had any revenue without all of those “cost centers” or legal liabilities.
- akkartik 5y ago
  Yeah, I agree with this. There's a larger context here of capitalism evolving firms because they're more efficient, even though they dilute the price-communication value of markets to some extent. As a consequence your boss and my boss are talking about something that might affect millions of people. That results in an effect akin to regulatory capture. So one way to view my case against division of labor is as a case for pushing intelligence to the edges, as close as possible to the owner of the computer running the software. On this larger level my suggestions are not actually that radical. Capitalism has had a long trend to push intelligence down to the edges. Kings used to use hierarchy to push decisions down. Blitzkrieg was largely about creating an organization that pushes decision-making down. And we've been getting better at it. I think we (i.e. society) can be even better at it by pushing decision-making out of the org and towards the people using it.