> So far the only way we know how to prevent this is to assign humans to guard the interest of the business. Managers very much work in their own self interest

> So far the only way we know how to prevent this is to assign humans to guard the interest of the business. Managers very much work in their own self interest, along with the rest of us. In an interview, an engineer might be asked something like, "how many nodes did you manager/how many lines of code/how many microservices/etc.," as a way of gauging their level of skill and expertise. There is an implicit understanding -- on both sides -- that the complexity of the systems the engineer dealt is directly correlated with their expertise and talent, even if that kind of proxy is irrational when you really think about it. Managers deal the same thing, except their questions are more along the lines of, "how many people reported to you/how big was you budget/etc." In fact, I'd argue that self-interest is even worse on the management side, because the career stakes are so much higher. I have seen, on several occasions, top management commit to a strategy that was objectively failing with no practical path to success, because admitting that the strategy had failed would have gotten them fired by the board. It can be extremely catastrophic to the company when it enters that kind of failure mode.