14 ms·

Supervisors often prefer rule breakers, up to a point

198 points by rustoo 2y ago

hyfgfh 2y ago
Dont add Elon Musk quotes to any serious thing please
ungreased0675 2y ago
This study is about the NHL, hardly applicable to other contexts.
- nickpeterson 2y ago
  Next time you get too many story points assigned on a sprint, cross-check your manager.
  - crscrosaplsauc 2y ago
    Spending some time in the box for 'snowing that hot-headed coworker' doesn't sound so bad.
    - doubled112 2y ago
      Four minutes for roughing after you punch somebody in the face? Sign me up!
      - rufus_foreman 2y ago
        >> Four minutes for roughing I've never seen a double minor for roughing. 2 minute minor or 5 minute major. 4 minute double minor is typically when someone is high sticked and they're bleeding because of it. So yeah, give a co-worker a hand to the face and if the manager catches it you're sitting out of the sprint planning meeting for either 2 or 5 minutes depending.
        9rx 2y ago
        > if the manager catches it you're sitting out of the sprint planning meeting for either 2 or 5 minutes depending. Going to be a lot of sore faces when this rule comes into effect.
        rufus_foreman 2y ago
        I mean those guys are allowed to fight back, too, it's fun to watch.
        bluefirebrand 2y ago
        > I've never seen a double minor for roughing. 2 minute minor or 5 minute major I've seen a double minor for roughing when both players involved get the roughing minor but one player gets the double for instigating
        rufus_foreman 2y ago
        First instigator penalty in a game is 2 minutes for instigating, 5 for fighting, and a 10 minute misconduct. So 17 minutes. Second one in a game is a game misconduct.
  - Spooky23 2y ago
    I’ve kinda done this at different points. Sometimes people need a good stern talking to out of band.
- crscrosaplsauc 2y ago
  How so? The study is about leadership, decision making, and risk vs reward. Is there not demonstrable (and multiple levels of) leadership within sports teams? I'm genuinely curious if you've participated in collegiate above sports - or at maybe even High School level. I would be very surprised if someone who played or participated seriously in sports said they didn't take away lessons about leadership and decision making.
  - Carrok 2y ago
    I’m sure they did take away lessons. Are those lessons applicable to the real world is the salient question.
    - pixl97 2y ago
      "Sports does not occur in the real world" That's a new one for me today.
      - bee_rider 2y ago
        Rule breaking is part of the game in sports. Players will, for example, take a penalty if it is worth it. Hockey has fights, basketball has fouls as a resource that gets expended over the course of the game.
        dilyevsky 2y ago
        Are you saying irl people don’t break the law or go against other conventions when they think it’s worth it?
        bee_rider 2y ago
        It’s just a game, so there’s no real moral component and the stakes are much lower generally.
        2y ago
- empath75 2y ago
  This whole thing is based on a serious misunderstanding on the role of penalties and fouls in sports. One can take a penalty strategically, for example to stop an almost sure goal, with the consequence of whatever the penalty is. That's just part of the game, and elite (ie: NHL) players are really smart about how they do it, and _should_ be rewarded for it. Then there are "dumb" penalties, and worse -- things that aren't penalties at all, that break "unwritten rules", and there's a whole bunch of them, like showboating, dirty shots, etc, and those won't get you the support of the team. And then there are you, know, team rules -- if you're out there not listening to the coach, you'll absolutely get benched.
neuroelectron 2y ago
Hard to see the negatives. Rule breakers allow you to reap the rewards while removing liability.
- nine_zeros 2y ago
  Every supervisor ever: Look my team is just an awesome team that achieves all goals by breaking rules. I was the fearless leader to lead them. Same supervisor when caught breaking rules: Rogue employee. Nothing to do with me. Will fire them.
  - wright-goes 2y ago
    Good point. Though if they change the rules after breaking them, will history remember? Looking at uber, any number of social media companies, etc., having some good lobbyists works wonders.
- Viliam1234 2y ago
  Why did I have to scroll down so far to see the correct answer? "You should understand the reason why the rule exists, so that you can decide when to follow it" -- yeah, then why is the reason not explained in the book containing the rules, including an explicit note that if the situation does not match the example, you are allowed to ignore the rule?
wileydragonfly 2y ago
I mean… I’m a supervisor and in that position primarily because I have a good sense of when to bend or break rules. And, yes, the employees that can strategically do the same are noticed.
userbinator 2y ago
As the old saying goes, "it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission."
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
taeric 2y ago
A more palatable phrasing, "supervisors prefer people that engage with the rules with purpose." That is, choosing to break a rule because you are making a cost call based on what you were able to achieve is not, necessarily, a bad thing. The "point" where this fails, of course, is where the "cost" call above is such that the supervisor can't agree.
- tyleo 2y ago
  You sound like a supervisor there ;) “They didn’t break the rule! They engaged in the rules with purpose unlike those rule followers.” Though I’m not advocating your approach is incorrect.
  - lazide 2y ago
    Someone who follows the rule even when it produces a terrible outcome is a painful liability. Just like someone who breaks the rule to do the same thing.
    - genewitch 2y ago
      > Someone who follows the rule even when it produces a terrible outcome is a painful liability. It is called malicious compliance for a reason.
  - taeric 2y ago
    Worse, I'm a parent! :D
- staunton 2y ago
  Sometimes, the goal is to create an environment where people must break certain rules to get anything done, which everyone (including supervisors) understands, but by way of imposing those rules responsibility and liability is transferred to subordinates.
  - InDubioProRubio 2y ago
    The use of private internet access for work is denied. Doing so, shifts all responsibility from the IT-department on the private citizen. The WiFi is currently out of service.
jmyeet 2y ago
So I'm fascinated with military culture and how systems work on this scale (ie millions of employees). And one interesting aspect is the E4 Mafia [1]. For those that don't know, you're generally either a commissioned officer (with ranks from 0-1 and up) or enlisted (E-1 to E-9). Some branches have warrant officers too but let's ignore that. So if you join as an enlisted you start off as a private in the Army (it's called something else in different branches). By the time you finish bootcamp you're an E-2 private, possibly an E-3 (Private First Class). If you're not an E-3 it's automatic promotion after ~6 months assumpting you don't have any red flags AFAIK. By the time you make it to E-4 (Corporal in the Army) you kinda know how things work BUT you're also in the last rank before you're in a leadership position. The next position (E-5, Sergeant in the Army) is a noncomissioned officer ("NCO"). Some people want to avoid that so they kinda hang around E-4 far longer than they should and they build up a body of knowledge on how to get things done. Or they may have been a higher rank and get busted down from an Article 15 (or NJP or whatever the specific branch calls it). Requisitions can be a huge issue in the military, evne for simple things like office supplies. So you may find that E-4s can "acquire" needed supplies from other units. NCOs, Staff NCOs and command tend to be aware of it but will ignore it because it kinda needs to happen. And those E-4s are called the "E4 Mafia". This, I believe, is the kind of "rule breaker" this post is referring to. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEgh-w4FIFc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEgh-w4FIFc
- wright-goes 2y ago
  In the US Army an E-4 is a specialist or a corporal. Most E-4s are specialists. The E-4 is the pay grade, and the specialist or corporal designation is the rank. A corporal is a type of lateral promotion from specialist and as a corporal the soldier is then considered a non-commissioned officer. One thing I think would've been helpful for the article to address are operational and or program leaders that strive to get things done, respect their team's time, and want to be a good steward of resources. These leaders may ask probing "why" questions trying to do what's arguably common sense. Cutting through red tape can be seen by others as rule breaking, but often it's just asking the questions others haven't and trying to do something in a new, hopefully better way. That means taking a risk that something could go wrong and that's received in different ways by people.
inetknght 2y ago
Loading the page with javascript and cookies disabled blocks the page load. Is there a better source?
pdpi 2y ago
Fundamentally, rules almost always come with compromises — for the sake of making rules understandable by humans, they have to be relatively simple. Simple rules for complex situations will always forbid some amount of good behaviour, and allow some bad behaviour. Many of society's parasites live in the space of "allowable bad behaviour", but there is a lot of value to knowing how to exploit the "forbidden good behaviour" space.
- efavdb 2y ago
  Example?
  - lazide 2y ago
    Not the poster, but some examples; - emotional support animals - take a penny, leave a penny - ‘discretion’ and speed limits - qualified immunity
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    For which side? Most examples boil down to common sense. Nobody is going to arrest a 14 year old for driving their dying parent to the hospital. Similarly, it is reprehensible but legal to pull up a chair and watch a child drown in a pool. There is a difference between law and morality, and humans will use the second to selectively enforce the former.
    - randomNumber7 2y ago
      > Similarly, it is reprehensible but legal to pull up a chair and watch a child drown in a pool. In which country? Even for the US I don't believe the law system is that crappy.
      - tdeck 2y ago
        I suppose it would depend a lot on the specifics of the situation, but there's less obligation to help others than I would have thought: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duty_to_rescue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duty_to_rescue
neilv 2y ago
> “Rule breaking appears to signal a team member’s commitment—a willingness to do whatever it takes to get the job done,” wrote Wakeman, Yang, and Moore, all of whom are hockey fans. Beyond "taking one for the team", in business, I didn't see the article make some key distinctions: * What is the origin of the rules? (Originated in the interests of the organization, or came from outside, such as regulatory requirements.) * How much does the organization care about the rules? (Some rules they just need to make a paper trail show of effort, and worst impact is a transactional cost-of-business fine, or an unflattering news cycle. Other rule violations could dethrone a CEO, or even send them to prison.) * Would the organization actually love to get away with violating that rule, when the right individual comes along to execute it without getting caught? (Say, some very lucrative financial scheme that's disallowed by regulations.) * How aligned is the manager with the organization wrt the rules in question? (Say, the company actually really doesn't want people to violate this one rule, but a manager gets bonuses and promotions when their reports have the advantage of breaking the rule.) Depending on those answers, a manager's claim of "Doing what it takes to get the job done!" can sound very different.
rblatz 2y ago
Anecdotally I’ve heard from professional athletes that steroid use is actually liked by coaches because it gives them better control over the locker room. If someone becomes an issue in the locker room, guess who is getting randomly selected for testing without a heads up warning.
- sudoshred 2y ago
  Similar thinking applies in other fields as well I am sure.
  - xdavidliu 2y ago
    yep, the concept is more general than steroids and often goes by terms like "blackmail" or "leverage"
nitwit005 2y ago
With sports, I'd just assume they were told to break the rules. They aren't breaking the rules their employer set, but the rules of the sports league.
jvanderbot 2y ago
You cant break rules yourself. But you sure can "scold" a rule breaker and then claim credit when they never break rules again. 90% of my best bosses just tanked the bad news when things went wrong but otherwise loved it when you do your best to work around the system.
jbmsf 2y ago
If I have to make a rule, it's to prevent the worst people from doing the worst things. If I have an opportunity to use my judgement and you are neither doing the worst thing or someone I consider the worst person, there's bound to be wiggle room.
thaumasiotes 2y ago
> “We found that when people broke the rules, teams were less likely to win games. Rule breaking hurts teams, despite the fact that people in positions of power, or coaches, might look at the rule breakers as people who are facilitating a better team,” Wakeman said. “The big caveat is that this is correlational, not causational.” This is a really surprising piece of commentary considering the finding in the immediately prior paragraph: > Different situations had different effects on coaches’ assessments of penalized players. Their generally favorable views [were] absent during winning streaks. So the thought process here is, first we observe that coaches like fouls when the team is losing, and don't like them when the team is winning. And then we say that the coaches must be misguided (unless there's some kind of bias in the sample, but come on, look at the data) because teams committing a lot of fouls are doing worse than teams that aren't.
seeknotfind 2y ago
Here's the dangerous way I put it that I only tell senior people: understand why rules were made and make sure the people who made them would be happy.
- nearting 2y ago
  > Here's the dangerous way I put it that I only tell senior people: understand why rules were made and make sure the people who made them would be happy. If you aren't absolutely sure those senior people know what they're doing, the this is a great way to end up with originalism.
  - achierius 2y ago
    Frankly, most corporations do not last long enough for this to be a problem. Governments are their own issue, but without the political inertia and staying power of a nation-state, your organization will likely be long dead (or at least irrelevant and dying) before interpretations will drift that far. Most of the time, for most engineers, at least some of the people who made these rules in the first place are still around -- which helps ensure that nothing drifts too too far. Of course there are exceptions, probably even upwards of 20% of the time, but we're talking generalities.
- chias 2y ago
  I saw this put really, really well not too long ago: > A lot of us got the message earlier in life that we had to wait for other's permission or encouragement to do things, when in fact, all you need is the ability to understand the situation and deal with the consequences
  - kqr 2y ago
    So fun to see other variations of this. I have for a while said > You never need permission to do a good job. But of course, it takes the experience to understand the nuances of what a good job is in the domain at hand, in the organisation and society at hand.
pengaru 2y ago
at a former startup the vp of eng liked to say "there are rules then there's enforcement of the rules"
madrox 2y ago
As a supervisor I didn’t resonate with this until I remembered in some jobs I have communicated the company attendance policy but didn’t enforce it unless someone was a poor performer. I trust adults to manage their own time until they give me a reason to believe otherwise. For my part, I’d rather trust people’s judgment and intrinsic motivation than enforce the rules. Enforcement is annoying, tedious, and distracting to my mission. However once I decide their judgement can’t be trusted I use rules to extrinsically motivate them.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- heymijo 2y ago
  And while this works for you, labor and employment attorneys use your non-standard application of the rules as a way to win lawsuits when brought against the company. Another way we end up with annoying, tedious, and distracting compliance (U.S. based take here).
  - madrox 2y ago
    A very fair and reasonable point
mmazing 2y ago
What has really come with experience and what has made me a great software engineer is knowing when rules matter, when to bend where to make things move more quickly. I prefer forgiveness over permission ...
__turbobrew__ 2y ago
Being mission focused can help in this regard. Knowing what you are trying to do and why you are trying to do it can guide you when to break the rules. This requires you to understand the business/organization and how the organization works. If a rule was set up to protect the company from breaking the law, you do not break those rules (unless you work in finance). If a rule was set up because someone with bad judgment did something dumb in the past which caused a snafu, make sure you aren’t being dumb. If you aren’t sure if you are being dumb or not, you are probably dumb. If you are sure you are not dumb, you are probably dumb. If you think you may not be dumb, you may in fact not be dumb.
hobs 2y ago
Every job I have worked, there's the rules, and the actual rules. The rules are what is written down, the actual rules is what is enforced. If the company wants you out or considers you low value/high maintenance, they use the rules. If the company likes you, they use the actual rules. If you are on the promotion track, they use the actual rules. Also, it turns out the actual rules actually have serious revisions as you go up the corporate ladder - things that would get you fired might not get your boss fired, and definitely wont get the CFO fired.
yi_xuan 2y ago
The key is understanding the purpose of the rules, its pros and cons, and recognizing the impact of your behavior, both its benefits and harm, considering the feelings of others at the same time. That's essential and most challenging part - the part that requires wisdom.
terramars 2y ago
"We found that when people broke the rules, teams were less likely to win games." This seems like a prima facie bad conclusion to their hockey study, considering that the Panthers won the cup while being effectively tied for the lead in penalty minutes, with #3 not being particularly close. Yes there's a weak correlation between penalties and losing, but considering that the absolute best teams usually have a high rat index, there's a big lost opportunity to go into the rat factor in hockey and how it translates to the corporate world!
bigbacaloa 2y ago
[dead]
kazinator 2y ago
Supervisors might let it slide if the organization's rules (that they didn't make or don't necessarily agree with) are broken. Supervisors will care if their own unofficial rules are broken. If you have a supervisor, pay attention to their own personal set of rules more than the org rules.
Aeolun 2y ago
Most people will gloss over the fact you broke a few rules to get there when the end result is good. Especially in large organizations, all rules exist for plausible deniability.
jillesvangurp 2y ago
As one of my friends used to joke: "rules are for other people". I live in a place that loves rules (Germany) and I come from one (Netherlands) that has people like I just quoted taking a more relaxed attitude to rules. Being pragmatic about rules and not placing blind trust in them is key to being able to adapt to changing circumstances. Germany is having a hard time adjusting to modern times. It's something that's being complained about a lot in the country. The topic of "Digitization" (capitalized, because that's a German grammar rule) has been a topic in elections for the last 20 years or so. They can't do it. There are rules that say that only paper signatures are valid. Never mind that this rule has been challenged, relaxed, etc. They stubbornly revert to doing everything on paper. It's infuriatingly stupid. You get this whole ritual of people printing paper, handing out copies, and insisting it's all done in person. I get plenty of docusign documents to sign as well these days. So I know that this perfectly acceptable. For official documents for the tax office even (via my accountant). It's fine. This rule no longer applies. But try explaining that to Germans. Breaking rules when they stop making sense and don't apply to changed circumstances is a sign of intelligence. Supervisors can't foresee all circumstances and they like people that can think for themselves that can adjust and follow the spirit of the rule rather than the letter of the rule.
a_c 2y ago
Rules are like abstraction of a software library, or OKR of a team. It is for people to follow with good enough result. But the abstraction need to be constantly reviewed, by library author, team leader, and legislative body to be useful and relevant. That's when rules become outdated, library got rotten, and OKRs complained
AngryData 2y ago
Of course they do, if someone below them break the rules and make more money, they profit. And if that same person then breaks the rules again but makes a mistake or loses money, they will use the rule breaking as an excuse to shed both inter-political and legal liability from themselves onto the lower employee with the excuse that they broke the rules.
newsclues 2y ago
productivity (making money) is better than following rules unless your break rules that negatively impact productivity This is why businesses will break laws when fines are less than profits.
smeej 2y ago
I can't work under more than three layers of management, largely because I've found that to be the practical maximum of managers who will care more about my results than whether I'm following the inefficient set of rules laid down when the target results were different. I don't think this is a problem, exactly. It just means I'm the kind of person who works much better in startups than mega corps. I can't not notice all the ways poorly made rules get in the way of getting things done, but once we hit the fourth layer of management, at least one of them WILL be the kind of manager who has gotten ahead in their career by writing and enforcing rules. All that means is that the company has grown to the point that it's time for me to move on to the next project. (And before anybody asks, of course there are some rules that are incredibly important. Many of them are codified as laws. Most of the rest would bring down the company. If I'm not willing to work within those rules, the company is the wrong fit for me from the start, regardless of size.)
taway789aaa6 2y ago
What's with the random musky quote shoved in there...
AllegedAlec 2y ago
David Snowden does/did a lot of talks about these, how hard rules break catastrophically and you need systems of constraints with flexible rules which have rules baked in about when and how you can break the rules. Worth looking up the talks they have on youtube. Just be prepared to hear the same few anecdotes 50 times.
Artoooooor 2y ago
I hate when I rely on others following the rules and they screw me over by breaking them. We had "focus hours" at work. They would have been amazing if not for some special individuals that decide it's OK to waste my 15 minutes to save their 10. Now we don't have focus hours. Or we should document everything on wiki. But why do it when better "documentation" is "ask A". And A is on vacation. That's why I despise rule breakers, they almost always make someone's life worse. And that someone else follows the rules. Rules should be for everybody or nobody.
- banannaise 2y ago
  When someone tries to schedule a meeting during my focus hours, I decline it. When someone DMs me about an issue they should post in the support channel, I link them to the support channel. If they insist, I link them to it again, and I inform my team not to respond to DMs from that person. Do not engage with people who think their time is more important than yours; if you do, insist on wasting their time in equal amounts.
curtisszmania 2y ago
[dead]
billy99k 2y ago
They prefer rule breakers because rigidly following the rules means things won't get done on time in almost all cases.
austin-cheney 2y ago
Yes and no. A more extreme example of this is the US Army's Mission Command Philosophy. The yes part: Leaders like velocity and don't want rules to slow people down. Rules exist for a reason, because somebody in the past has fucked it up for the rest of us. Leadership still wants goal accomplishment in the shortest time frame and at the cheapest cost, though. The US Army baked this into the cornerstone of their leadership approach more than 20 years. The central concept is for a leader to tell their people at set of goals and then release their people into the wild and figure it out on their own. This provides flexibility with minimal constraints, which is especially important in a rapidly changing environment of fluid changes where the senior leader has outdated information. Its also why corporate leadership doesn't discourage working on personal code projects if that value comes back to the organization. The no part: Leaders, at least the non-toxic ones, don't want to cannibalize their people. Even if rules are not important ethics certainly are. Good leaders don't want narcissistic assholes rotting the organization from the inside even if it does mean higher velocity. If your organization reaches a market milestone first but everybody has left the organization then its purely a Pyrrhic victory and the organization will still lose. This is why up to 25% of flag officers in the US military are continually under investigation at any time. In the corporate world this is crystal clear when you look at your leadership and your peers. Are they primarily interested in releasing a product or reaching an organizational goal or are they primarily interested in their place within the organization or the appearance of relationships.
ike2792 2y ago
In any large organization, there are basically two classes of rules: 1) stupid red tape rules that slow everyone down and 2) really important rules that you can never break ever. Effective people learn which rules fall into which group so they can break the red tape rules and get more stuff done.
- Zak 2y ago
  This study seems to be focused on breaking rules imposed on the organization by external entities, not rules the organization created independently to support its own objectives. Supervisors aligned with an organization's goals likely often view such external rules with contempt. It's not surprising they tolerate or support rule breaking as long as they believe it won't be punished externally.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > study seems to be focused on breaking rules imposed on the organization by external entities Those rules similarly fall into traffic tickets and murder charges.
- andruby 2y ago
  That's a rather binary view and I disagree that rules always fall in either category. Knowing _why_ a rule exists and what it's trying to prevent/achieve is much more valuable in my opinion. Wether or not to follow or bend a rule depends so much on the context.
  - martinsnow 2y ago
    Your argument circles back to the posters point. Knowing which rule you can break at a specific point in time. Why are you being so anal about it?
    - zamadatix 2y ago
      I think it's a worthwhile addition to highlight there is 3) rules which are sometimes red tape and sometimes to be broken, on top of the other 2 categories. It adds on to the original point with the addition of how to universally discover what the categories are rather than prescribe them up front.
RunSet 2y ago
> While incompetence is merely a barrier to further promotion, "super-incompetence" is grounds for dismissal, as is "super-competence". In both cases, "they tend to disrupt the hierarchy." One specific example of a super-competent employee is a teacher of children with special needs: they were so effective at educating the children that, after a year, they exceeded all expectations at reading and arithmetic, but the teacher was still fired because they had neglected to devote enough time to bead-stringing and finger-painting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle#Summary_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle#Summary_2
- tombhowl 2y ago
  [dead]
- bell-cot 2y ago
  > ...a teacher of children with special needs...fired... Note that that example is from (at latest) the 1960's. These days, at least in better-off areas, the parents of the affected special needs kids would likely make life hell for the School Board behind that firing. More generally: If your super-competence is highly beneficial to some folks further up the pecking order, that often takes precedence.
Quarrelsome 2y ago
This reminds me of the stories that Gary's economics shared with his time at Citigroup which corroborates some of the stories my dad had as an accountant in investment firms. That is, a lot of dicey stuff happens and management tends to only care about the results and intentionally places the responsibility on the traders by operating a very loose leash. This is combined with a % based commission which encourages rule breaking, given how high the rewards can be. The loose leash means when something bad is discovered (and this was the sort of thing my dad would uncover as an accountant) supervisors had this plausible deniability they could fall back on. This meant they could reap the rewards of positive returns while mitigating the blowback on them in the worst case outcomes. Gary specifically shared a story when he tried to quit in that he was threatened with an investigation to dredge up all the bad stuff he'd done in order to be one of the more successful traders, which ultimately ended up as a big nothing burger as he didn't break any rules to get his returns. What was telling, was the assumption that they _would_ find something to use a cudgel to keep him there, as if it was almost expected.
mrdoops 2y ago
The important thing is to know fundamentally "why" a rule exists and what goal / organizational objective it's existence and constraints provides. Then breaking it can be productive if it meets the same ends. This usually puts the rule breaker at conflict with people in the organization who put adherence to process higher in priority than the actual organizational goals.
RazorDev 2y ago
[flagged]
heisenbit 2y ago
Breaking rules by subordinates frees supervisors from properly delegating power (implies taking responsibility for the delegation) or changing the rules (again taking responsibility). It is a quite convenient stance - something works you win - it fails not your fault.
gwern 2y ago
Preprint: https://www.celiamoore.com/uploads/9/3/2/1/9321973/wakeman_yang_moore_amd_in_press.pdf https://www.celiamoore.com/uploads/9/3/2/1/9321973/wakeman_y... A useful concept here is the 'incompleteness of contracts' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incomplete_contracts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incomplete_contracts): essentially, even for the simplest contract, it is impossible to write down an unambiguous set of rules or contract terms covering every possible outcome or disagreement. Contracts can only be starting points. This is similar to the failure of GOFAI to turn the world into symbolic rules: it may be possible in theory, but not in practice. Anytime a principle hires an agent, they have to leave a lot up to the agent, which is why we have principle-agent problems. So what does that imply for any 'rule'? Well, that it has to be wrong and destructive some of the time. (See also: "work-to-rule strike" or sabotage.) This will be especially true for rules imposed from the outside: if it's impossible for individuals or organizations given a free hand to make perfect rules that should always be followed, how on earth is some third party, like the dead hand of a regulation from a century ago, going to do so? So you want your agents to break the rules... but only, of course, when it's a good thing to break the rules. How do you know that? Well, if it was easy to do so cheaply, you probably wouldn't have the rule in the first place! So in practice, a lot of what happens is just this: if your agent breaks the rules periodically and nothing bad happens, then they probably were doing the right thing; and if your organization encourages the right amount of rulebreaking, it will slightly tend to do better than the ones which don't. Of course, sometimes your agents weren't doing the right wrong things, just the wrong wrong things, and you just normalized their deviance which is going to explode in someone's face eventually. That is of course true. But if you cherrypick just a few sensational cases and treat them as if that was what supervisors were trying to encourage, you implicitly are denying that the lubricant of the world is often well-chosen rule-breaking.
anthomtb 2y ago
"If you ain't cheatin', you ain't tryin'" Reminds me of an incident early in my career. I was developing embedded software and needed an expensive, specialized signal analyzer. Management refused to purchase or assign one to me. I was stuck sharing with my lead, which was highly inconvenient for both of us. Well, turns out one of those analyzers was assigned to a guy (Dave) about to retire. I wandered over to Dave's cube the day after he left and sure enough, there is my much-needed analyzer. It is poorly locked to a table leg by a rather long cable. So I tilted up the table, slid the cable off the bottom of the leg, lugged the analyzer to my office and enjoyed an relaxing afternoon of debug. I got a nice talking-to from management once they realized what happened. And most importantly, became the new assignee of Dave's analyzer.
crowcroft 2y ago
In the short term rule breaking generally leads to better productivity. In the long term rule breakers can just job hop .
1970-01-01 2y ago
The relevant aphorism is 'everything is negotiable'

198 points by rustoo 2y ago

hyfgfh 2y ago

Dont add Elon Musk quotes to any serious thing please

ungreased0675 2y ago

This study is about the NHL, hardly applicable to other contexts.

nickpeterson 2y ago
Next time you get too many story points assigned on a sprint, cross-check your manager.
- crscrosaplsauc 2y ago
  Spending some time in the box for 'snowing that hot-headed coworker' doesn't sound so bad.
  - doubled112 2y ago
    Four minutes for roughing after you punch somebody in the face? Sign me up!
    - rufus_foreman 2y ago
      >> Four minutes for roughing I've never seen a double minor for roughing. 2 minute minor or 5 minute major. 4 minute double minor is typically when someone is high sticked and they're bleeding because of it. So yeah, give a co-worker a hand to the face and if the manager catches it you're sitting out of the sprint planning meeting for either 2 or 5 minutes depending.
      - 9rx 2y ago
        > if the manager catches it you're sitting out of the sprint planning meeting for either 2 or 5 minutes depending. Going to be a lot of sore faces when this rule comes into effect.
        rufus_foreman 2y ago
        I mean those guys are allowed to fight back, too, it's fun to watch.
      - bluefirebrand 2y ago
        > I've never seen a double minor for roughing. 2 minute minor or 5 minute major I've seen a double minor for roughing when both players involved get the roughing minor but one player gets the double for instigating
        rufus_foreman 2y ago
        First instigator penalty in a game is 2 minutes for instigating, 5 for fighting, and a 10 minute misconduct. So 17 minutes. Second one in a game is a game misconduct.
- Spooky23 2y ago
  I’ve kinda done this at different points. Sometimes people need a good stern talking to out of band.
crscrosaplsauc 2y ago
How so? The study is about leadership, decision making, and risk vs reward. Is there not demonstrable (and multiple levels of) leadership within sports teams? I'm genuinely curious if you've participated in collegiate above sports - or at maybe even High School level. I would be very surprised if someone who played or participated seriously in sports said they didn't take away lessons about leadership and decision making.
- Carrok 2y ago
  I’m sure they did take away lessons. Are those lessons applicable to the real world is the salient question.
  - pixl97 2y ago
    "Sports does not occur in the real world" That's a new one for me today.
    - bee_rider 2y ago
      Rule breaking is part of the game in sports. Players will, for example, take a penalty if it is worth it. Hockey has fights, basketball has fouls as a resource that gets expended over the course of the game.
      - dilyevsky 2y ago
        Are you saying irl people don’t break the law or go against other conventions when they think it’s worth it?
        bee_rider 2y ago
        It’s just a game, so there’s no real moral component and the stakes are much lower generally.
        2y ago
empath75 2y ago
This whole thing is based on a serious misunderstanding on the role of penalties and fouls in sports. One can take a penalty strategically, for example to stop an almost sure goal, with the consequence of whatever the penalty is. That's just part of the game, and elite (ie: NHL) players are really smart about how they do it, and _should_ be rewarded for it. Then there are "dumb" penalties, and worse -- things that aren't penalties at all, that break "unwritten rules", and there's a whole bunch of them, like showboating, dirty shots, etc, and those won't get you the support of the team. And then there are you, know, team rules -- if you're out there not listening to the coach, you'll absolutely get benched.

neuroelectron 2y ago

Hard to see the negatives. Rule breakers allow you to reap the rewards while removing liability.

nine_zeros 2y ago
Every supervisor ever: Look my team is just an awesome team that achieves all goals by breaking rules. I was the fearless leader to lead them. Same supervisor when caught breaking rules: Rogue employee. Nothing to do with me. Will fire them.
- wright-goes 2y ago
  Good point. Though if they change the rules after breaking them, will history remember? Looking at uber, any number of social media companies, etc., having some good lobbyists works wonders.
Viliam1234 2y ago
Why did I have to scroll down so far to see the correct answer? "You should understand the reason why the rule exists, so that you can decide when to follow it" -- yeah, then why is the reason not explained in the book containing the rules, including an explicit note that if the situation does not match the example, you are allowed to ignore the rule?

wileydragonfly 2y ago

I mean… I’m a supervisor and in that position primarily because I have a good sense of when to bend or break rules. And, yes, the employees that can strategically do the same are noticed.

userbinator 2y ago

As the old saying goes, "it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission."

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

taeric 2y ago

A more palatable phrasing, "supervisors prefer people that engage with the rules with purpose." That is, choosing to break a rule because you are making a cost call based on what you were able to achieve is not, necessarily, a bad thing. The "point" where this fails, of course, is where the "cost" call above is such that the supervisor can't agree.

tyleo 2y ago
You sound like a supervisor there ;) “They didn’t break the rule! They engaged in the rules with purpose unlike those rule followers.” Though I’m not advocating your approach is incorrect.
- lazide 2y ago
  Someone who follows the rule even when it produces a terrible outcome is a painful liability. Just like someone who breaks the rule to do the same thing.
  - genewitch 2y ago
    > Someone who follows the rule even when it produces a terrible outcome is a painful liability. It is called malicious compliance for a reason.
- taeric 2y ago
  Worse, I'm a parent! :D
staunton 2y ago
Sometimes, the goal is to create an environment where people must break certain rules to get anything done, which everyone (including supervisors) understands, but by way of imposing those rules responsibility and liability is transferred to subordinates.
- InDubioProRubio 2y ago
  The use of private internet access for work is denied. Doing so, shifts all responsibility from the IT-department on the private citizen. The WiFi is currently out of service.

jmyeet 2y ago

So I'm fascinated with military culture and how systems work on this scale (ie millions of employees). And one interesting aspect is the E4 Mafia [1]. For those that don't know, you're generally either a commissioned officer (with ranks from 0-1 and up) or enlisted (E-1 to E-9). Some branches have warrant officers too but let's ignore that. So if you join as an enlisted you start off as a private in the Army (it's called something else in different branches). By the time you finish bootcamp you're an E-2 private, possibly an E-3 (Private First Class). If you're not an E-3 it's automatic promotion after ~6 months assumpting you don't have any red flags AFAIK. By the time you make it to E-4 (Corporal in the Army) you kinda know how things work BUT you're also in the last rank before you're in a leadership position. The next position (E-5, Sergeant in the Army) is a noncomissioned officer ("NCO"). Some people want to avoid that so they kinda hang around E-4 far longer than they should and they build up a body of knowledge on how to get things done. Or they may have been a higher rank and get busted down from an Article 15 (or NJP or whatever the specific branch calls it). Requisitions can be a huge issue in the military, evne for simple things like office supplies. So you may find that E-4s can "acquire" needed supplies from other units. NCOs, Staff NCOs and command tend to be aware of it but will ignore it because it kinda needs to happen. And those E-4s are called the "E4 Mafia". This, I believe, is the kind of "rule breaker" this post is referring to. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEgh-w4FIFc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEgh-w4FIFc

wright-goes 2y ago
In the US Army an E-4 is a specialist or a corporal. Most E-4s are specialists. The E-4 is the pay grade, and the specialist or corporal designation is the rank. A corporal is a type of lateral promotion from specialist and as a corporal the soldier is then considered a non-commissioned officer. One thing I think would've been helpful for the article to address are operational and or program leaders that strive to get things done, respect their team's time, and want to be a good steward of resources. These leaders may ask probing "why" questions trying to do what's arguably common sense. Cutting through red tape can be seen by others as rule breaking, but often it's just asking the questions others haven't and trying to do something in a new, hopefully better way. That means taking a risk that something could go wrong and that's received in different ways by people.

inetknght 2y ago

Loading the page with javascript and cookies disabled blocks the page load. Is there a better source?

pdpi 2y ago

Fundamentally, rules almost always come with compromises — for the sake of making rules understandable by humans, they have to be relatively simple. Simple rules for complex situations will always forbid some amount of good behaviour, and allow some bad behaviour. Many of society's parasites live in the space of "allowable bad behaviour", but there is a lot of value to knowing how to exploit the "forbidden good behaviour" space.

efavdb 2y ago
Example?
- lazide 2y ago
  Not the poster, but some examples; - emotional support animals - take a penny, leave a penny - ‘discretion’ and speed limits - qualified immunity
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  For which side? Most examples boil down to common sense. Nobody is going to arrest a 14 year old for driving their dying parent to the hospital. Similarly, it is reprehensible but legal to pull up a chair and watch a child drown in a pool. There is a difference between law and morality, and humans will use the second to selectively enforce the former.
  - randomNumber7 2y ago
    > Similarly, it is reprehensible but legal to pull up a chair and watch a child drown in a pool. In which country? Even for the US I don't believe the law system is that crappy.
    - tdeck 2y ago
      I suppose it would depend a lot on the specifics of the situation, but there's less obligation to help others than I would have thought: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duty_to_rescue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duty_to_rescue

neilv 2y ago

> “Rule breaking appears to signal a team member’s commitment—a willingness to do whatever it takes to get the job done,” wrote Wakeman, Yang, and Moore, all of whom are hockey fans. Beyond "taking one for the team", in business, I didn't see the article make some key distinctions: * What is the origin of the rules? (Originated in the interests of the organization, or came from outside, such as regulatory requirements.) * How much does the organization care about the rules? (Some rules they just need to make a paper trail show of effort, and worst impact is a transactional cost-of-business fine, or an unflattering news cycle. Other rule violations could dethrone a CEO, or even send them to prison.) * Would the organization actually love to get away with violating that rule, when the right individual comes along to execute it without getting caught? (Say, some very lucrative financial scheme that's disallowed by regulations.) * How aligned is the manager with the organization wrt the rules in question? (Say, the company actually really doesn't want people to violate this one rule, but a manager gets bonuses and promotions when their reports have the advantage of breaking the rule.) Depending on those answers, a manager's claim of "Doing what it takes to get the job done!" can sound very different.

rblatz 2y ago

Anecdotally I’ve heard from professional athletes that steroid use is actually liked by coaches because it gives them better control over the locker room. If someone becomes an issue in the locker room, guess who is getting randomly selected for testing without a heads up warning.

sudoshred 2y ago
Similar thinking applies in other fields as well I am sure.
- xdavidliu 2y ago
  yep, the concept is more general than steroids and often goes by terms like "blackmail" or "leverage"

nitwit005 2y ago

With sports, I'd just assume they were told to break the rules. They aren't breaking the rules their employer set, but the rules of the sports league.

jvanderbot 2y ago

You cant break rules yourself. But you sure can "scold" a rule breaker and then claim credit when they never break rules again. 90% of my best bosses just tanked the bad news when things went wrong but otherwise loved it when you do your best to work around the system.

jbmsf 2y ago

If I have to make a rule, it's to prevent the worst people from doing the worst things. If I have an opportunity to use my judgement and you are neither doing the worst thing or someone I consider the worst person, there's bound to be wiggle room.

thaumasiotes 2y ago

> “We found that when people broke the rules, teams were less likely to win games. Rule breaking hurts teams, despite the fact that people in positions of power, or coaches, might look at the rule breakers as people who are facilitating a better team,” Wakeman said. “The big caveat is that this is correlational, not causational.” This is a really surprising piece of commentary considering the finding in the immediately prior paragraph: > Different situations had different effects on coaches’ assessments of penalized players. Their generally favorable views [were] absent during winning streaks. So the thought process here is, first we observe that coaches like fouls when the team is losing, and don't like them when the team is winning. And then we say that the coaches must be misguided (unless there's some kind of bias in the sample, but come on, look at the data) because teams committing a lot of fouls are doing worse than teams that aren't.

seeknotfind 2y ago

Here's the dangerous way I put it that I only tell senior people: understand why rules were made and make sure the people who made them would be happy.

nearting 2y ago
> Here's the dangerous way I put it that I only tell senior people: understand why rules were made and make sure the people who made them would be happy. If you aren't absolutely sure those senior people know what they're doing, the this is a great way to end up with originalism.
- achierius 2y ago
  Frankly, most corporations do not last long enough for this to be a problem. Governments are their own issue, but without the political inertia and staying power of a nation-state, your organization will likely be long dead (or at least irrelevant and dying) before interpretations will drift that far. Most of the time, for most engineers, at least some of the people who made these rules in the first place are still around -- which helps ensure that nothing drifts too too far. Of course there are exceptions, probably even upwards of 20% of the time, but we're talking generalities.
chias 2y ago
I saw this put really, really well not too long ago: > A lot of us got the message earlier in life that we had to wait for other's permission or encouragement to do things, when in fact, all you need is the ability to understand the situation and deal with the consequences
- kqr 2y ago
  So fun to see other variations of this. I have for a while said > You never need permission to do a good job. But of course, it takes the experience to understand the nuances of what a good job is in the domain at hand, in the organisation and society at hand.

pengaru 2y ago

at a former startup the vp of eng liked to say "there are rules then there's enforcement of the rules"

madrox 2y ago

As a supervisor I didn’t resonate with this until I remembered in some jobs I have communicated the company attendance policy but didn’t enforce it unless someone was a poor performer. I trust adults to manage their own time until they give me a reason to believe otherwise. For my part, I’d rather trust people’s judgment and intrinsic motivation than enforce the rules. Enforcement is annoying, tedious, and distracting to my mission. However once I decide their judgement can’t be trusted I use rules to extrinsically motivate them.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
heymijo 2y ago
And while this works for you, labor and employment attorneys use your non-standard application of the rules as a way to win lawsuits when brought against the company. Another way we end up with annoying, tedious, and distracting compliance (U.S. based take here).
- madrox 2y ago
  A very fair and reasonable point

mmazing 2y ago

What has really come with experience and what has made me a great software engineer is knowing when rules matter, when to bend where to make things move more quickly. I prefer forgiveness over permission ...

__turbobrew__ 2y ago

Being mission focused can help in this regard. Knowing what you are trying to do and why you are trying to do it can guide you when to break the rules. This requires you to understand the business/organization and how the organization works. If a rule was set up to protect the company from breaking the law, you do not break those rules (unless you work in finance). If a rule was set up because someone with bad judgment did something dumb in the past which caused a snafu, make sure you aren’t being dumb. If you aren’t sure if you are being dumb or not, you are probably dumb. If you are sure you are not dumb, you are probably dumb. If you think you may not be dumb, you may in fact not be dumb.

hobs 2y ago

Every job I have worked, there's the rules, and the actual rules. The rules are what is written down, the actual rules is what is enforced. If the company wants you out or considers you low value/high maintenance, they use the rules. If the company likes you, they use the actual rules. If you are on the promotion track, they use the actual rules. Also, it turns out the actual rules actually have serious revisions as you go up the corporate ladder - things that would get you fired might not get your boss fired, and definitely wont get the CFO fired.

yi_xuan 2y ago

The key is understanding the purpose of the rules, its pros and cons, and recognizing the impact of your behavior, both its benefits and harm, considering the feelings of others at the same time. That's essential and most challenging part - the part that requires wisdom.

terramars 2y ago

"We found that when people broke the rules, teams were less likely to win games." This seems like a prima facie bad conclusion to their hockey study, considering that the Panthers won the cup while being effectively tied for the lead in penalty minutes, with #3 not being particularly close. Yes there's a weak correlation between penalties and losing, but considering that the absolute best teams usually have a high rat index, there's a big lost opportunity to go into the rat factor in hockey and how it translates to the corporate world!

bigbacaloa 2y ago

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kazinator 2y ago

Supervisors might let it slide if the organization's rules (that they didn't make or don't necessarily agree with) are broken. Supervisors will care if their own unofficial rules are broken. If you have a supervisor, pay attention to their own personal set of rules more than the org rules.

Aeolun 2y ago

Most people will gloss over the fact you broke a few rules to get there when the end result is good. Especially in large organizations, all rules exist for plausible deniability.

jillesvangurp 2y ago

As one of my friends used to joke: "rules are for other people". I live in a place that loves rules (Germany) and I come from one (Netherlands) that has people like I just quoted taking a more relaxed attitude to rules. Being pragmatic about rules and not placing blind trust in them is key to being able to adapt to changing circumstances. Germany is having a hard time adjusting to modern times. It's something that's being complained about a lot in the country. The topic of "Digitization" (capitalized, because that's a German grammar rule) has been a topic in elections for the last 20 years or so. They can't do it. There are rules that say that only paper signatures are valid. Never mind that this rule has been challenged, relaxed, etc. They stubbornly revert to doing everything on paper. It's infuriatingly stupid. You get this whole ritual of people printing paper, handing out copies, and insisting it's all done in person. I get plenty of docusign documents to sign as well these days. So I know that this perfectly acceptable. For official documents for the tax office even (via my accountant). It's fine. This rule no longer applies. But try explaining that to Germans. Breaking rules when they stop making sense and don't apply to changed circumstances is a sign of intelligence. Supervisors can't foresee all circumstances and they like people that can think for themselves that can adjust and follow the spirit of the rule rather than the letter of the rule.

a_c 2y ago

Rules are like abstraction of a software library, or OKR of a team. It is for people to follow with good enough result. But the abstraction need to be constantly reviewed, by library author, team leader, and legislative body to be useful and relevant. That's when rules become outdated, library got rotten, and OKRs complained

AngryData 2y ago

Of course they do, if someone below them break the rules and make more money, they profit. And if that same person then breaks the rules again but makes a mistake or loses money, they will use the rule breaking as an excuse to shed both inter-political and legal liability from themselves onto the lower employee with the excuse that they broke the rules.

newsclues 2y ago

productivity (making money) is better than following rules unless your break rules that negatively impact productivity This is why businesses will break laws when fines are less than profits.

smeej 2y ago

I can't work under more than three layers of management, largely because I've found that to be the practical maximum of managers who will care more about my results than whether I'm following the inefficient set of rules laid down when the target results were different. I don't think this is a problem, exactly. It just means I'm the kind of person who works much better in startups than mega corps. I can't not notice all the ways poorly made rules get in the way of getting things done, but once we hit the fourth layer of management, at least one of them WILL be the kind of manager who has gotten ahead in their career by writing and enforcing rules. All that means is that the company has grown to the point that it's time for me to move on to the next project. (And before anybody asks, of course there are some rules that are incredibly important. Many of them are codified as laws. Most of the rest would bring down the company. If I'm not willing to work within those rules, the company is the wrong fit for me from the start, regardless of size.)

taway789aaa6 2y ago

What's with the random musky quote shoved in there...

AllegedAlec 2y ago

David Snowden does/did a lot of talks about these, how hard rules break catastrophically and you need systems of constraints with flexible rules which have rules baked in about when and how you can break the rules. Worth looking up the talks they have on youtube. Just be prepared to hear the same few anecdotes 50 times.

Artoooooor 2y ago

I hate when I rely on others following the rules and they screw me over by breaking them. We had "focus hours" at work. They would have been amazing if not for some special individuals that decide it's OK to waste my 15 minutes to save their 10. Now we don't have focus hours. Or we should document everything on wiki. But why do it when better "documentation" is "ask A". And A is on vacation. That's why I despise rule breakers, they almost always make someone's life worse. And that someone else follows the rules. Rules should be for everybody or nobody.

banannaise 2y ago
When someone tries to schedule a meeting during my focus hours, I decline it. When someone DMs me about an issue they should post in the support channel, I link them to the support channel. If they insist, I link them to it again, and I inform my team not to respond to DMs from that person. Do not engage with people who think their time is more important than yours; if you do, insist on wasting their time in equal amounts.

curtisszmania 2y ago

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billy99k 2y ago

They prefer rule breakers because rigidly following the rules means things won't get done on time in almost all cases.

austin-cheney 2y ago

Yes and no. A more extreme example of this is the US Army's Mission Command Philosophy. The yes part: Leaders like velocity and don't want rules to slow people down. Rules exist for a reason, because somebody in the past has fucked it up for the rest of us. Leadership still wants goal accomplishment in the shortest time frame and at the cheapest cost, though. The US Army baked this into the cornerstone of their leadership approach more than 20 years. The central concept is for a leader to tell their people at set of goals and then release their people into the wild and figure it out on their own. This provides flexibility with minimal constraints, which is especially important in a rapidly changing environment of fluid changes where the senior leader has outdated information. Its also why corporate leadership doesn't discourage working on personal code projects if that value comes back to the organization. The no part: Leaders, at least the non-toxic ones, don't want to cannibalize their people. Even if rules are not important ethics certainly are. Good leaders don't want narcissistic assholes rotting the organization from the inside even if it does mean higher velocity. If your organization reaches a market milestone first but everybody has left the organization then its purely a Pyrrhic victory and the organization will still lose. This is why up to 25% of flag officers in the US military are continually under investigation at any time. In the corporate world this is crystal clear when you look at your leadership and your peers. Are they primarily interested in releasing a product or reaching an organizational goal or are they primarily interested in their place within the organization or the appearance of relationships.

ike2792 2y ago

In any large organization, there are basically two classes of rules: 1) stupid red tape rules that slow everyone down and 2) really important rules that you can never break ever. Effective people learn which rules fall into which group so they can break the red tape rules and get more stuff done.

Zak 2y ago
This study seems to be focused on breaking rules imposed on the organization by external entities, not rules the organization created independently to support its own objectives. Supervisors aligned with an organization's goals likely often view such external rules with contempt. It's not surprising they tolerate or support rule breaking as long as they believe it won't be punished externally.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > study seems to be focused on breaking rules imposed on the organization by external entities Those rules similarly fall into traffic tickets and murder charges.
andruby 2y ago
That's a rather binary view and I disagree that rules always fall in either category. Knowing _why_ a rule exists and what it's trying to prevent/achieve is much more valuable in my opinion. Wether or not to follow or bend a rule depends so much on the context.
- martinsnow 2y ago
  Your argument circles back to the posters point. Knowing which rule you can break at a specific point in time. Why are you being so anal about it?
  - zamadatix 2y ago
    I think it's a worthwhile addition to highlight there is 3) rules which are sometimes red tape and sometimes to be broken, on top of the other 2 categories. It adds on to the original point with the addition of how to universally discover what the categories are rather than prescribe them up front.

RunSet 2y ago

> While incompetence is merely a barrier to further promotion, "super-incompetence" is grounds for dismissal, as is "super-competence". In both cases, "they tend to disrupt the hierarchy." One specific example of a super-competent employee is a teacher of children with special needs: they were so effective at educating the children that, after a year, they exceeded all expectations at reading and arithmetic, but the teacher was still fired because they had neglected to devote enough time to bead-stringing and finger-painting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle#Summary_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle#Summary_2

tombhowl 2y ago
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bell-cot 2y ago
> ...a teacher of children with special needs...fired... Note that that example is from (at latest) the 1960's. These days, at least in better-off areas, the parents of the affected special needs kids would likely make life hell for the School Board behind that firing. More generally: If your super-competence is highly beneficial to some folks further up the pecking order, that often takes precedence.

Quarrelsome 2y ago

This reminds me of the stories that Gary's economics shared with his time at Citigroup which corroborates some of the stories my dad had as an accountant in investment firms. That is, a lot of dicey stuff happens and management tends to only care about the results and intentionally places the responsibility on the traders by operating a very loose leash. This is combined with a % based commission which encourages rule breaking, given how high the rewards can be. The loose leash means when something bad is discovered (and this was the sort of thing my dad would uncover as an accountant) supervisors had this plausible deniability they could fall back on. This meant they could reap the rewards of positive returns while mitigating the blowback on them in the worst case outcomes. Gary specifically shared a story when he tried to quit in that he was threatened with an investigation to dredge up all the bad stuff he'd done in order to be one of the more successful traders, which ultimately ended up as a big nothing burger as he didn't break any rules to get his returns. What was telling, was the assumption that they _would_ find something to use a cudgel to keep him there, as if it was almost expected.

mrdoops 2y ago

The important thing is to know fundamentally "why" a rule exists and what goal / organizational objective it's existence and constraints provides. Then breaking it can be productive if it meets the same ends. This usually puts the rule breaker at conflict with people in the organization who put adherence to process higher in priority than the actual organizational goals.

RazorDev 2y ago

[flagged]

heisenbit 2y ago

Breaking rules by subordinates frees supervisors from properly delegating power (implies taking responsibility for the delegation) or changing the rules (again taking responsibility). It is a quite convenient stance - something works you win - it fails not your fault.

gwern 2y ago

Preprint: https://www.celiamoore.com/uploads/9/3/2/1/9321973/wakeman_yang_moore_amd_in_press.pdf https://www.celiamoore.com/uploads/9/3/2/1/9321973/wakeman_y... A useful concept here is the 'incompleteness of contracts' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incomplete_contracts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incomplete_contracts): essentially, even for the simplest contract, it is impossible to write down an unambiguous set of rules or contract terms covering every possible outcome or disagreement. Contracts can only be starting points. This is similar to the failure of GOFAI to turn the world into symbolic rules: it may be possible in theory, but not in practice. Anytime a principle hires an agent, they have to leave a lot up to the agent, which is why we have principle-agent problems. So what does that imply for any 'rule'? Well, that it has to be wrong and destructive some of the time. (See also: "work-to-rule strike" or sabotage.) This will be especially true for rules imposed from the outside: if it's impossible for individuals or organizations given a free hand to make perfect rules that should always be followed, how on earth is some third party, like the dead hand of a regulation from a century ago, going to do so? So you want your agents to break the rules... but only, of course, when it's a good thing to break the rules. How do you know that? Well, if it was easy to do so cheaply, you probably wouldn't have the rule in the first place! So in practice, a lot of what happens is just this: if your agent breaks the rules periodically and nothing bad happens, then they probably were doing the right thing; and if your organization encourages the right amount of rulebreaking, it will slightly tend to do better than the ones which don't. Of course, sometimes your agents weren't doing the right wrong things, just the wrong wrong things, and you just normalized their deviance which is going to explode in someone's face eventually. That is of course true. But if you cherrypick just a few sensational cases and treat them as if that was what supervisors were trying to encourage, you implicitly are denying that the lubricant of the world is often well-chosen rule-breaking.

anthomtb 2y ago

"If you ain't cheatin', you ain't tryin'" Reminds me of an incident early in my career. I was developing embedded software and needed an expensive, specialized signal analyzer. Management refused to purchase or assign one to me. I was stuck sharing with my lead, which was highly inconvenient for both of us. Well, turns out one of those analyzers was assigned to a guy (Dave) about to retire. I wandered over to Dave's cube the day after he left and sure enough, there is my much-needed analyzer. It is poorly locked to a table leg by a rather long cable. So I tilted up the table, slid the cable off the bottom of the leg, lugged the analyzer to my office and enjoyed an relaxing afternoon of debug. I got a nice talking-to from management once they realized what happened. And most importantly, became the new assignee of Dave's analyzer.

crowcroft 2y ago

In the short term rule breaking generally leads to better productivity. In the long term rule breakers can just job hop .

1970-01-01 2y ago

The relevant aphorism is 'everything is negotiable'