That depends on the management and is part of what makes a good manager. I have heard of many accounts of successful and well liked technical managers admitting their job is to be a shield to their team/abstraction layer to allow them ability to focus and explore appropriately while not being buffeted by contradictory direct commands and meetings - all while not ignoring them unduly either.

Upper management was perfectly okay with that because they had good release quality and time tables.

But how often do people who do the work that brings in money (in this example, the people coding the project) get a fair share of that profit?

Define "fair". Surely the CEO is worth 800 times what any single coder is.

I think you forgot the sarcasm tags.

Sometimes it's fun to leave things a little ambiguous. But, yeah, you figured it out.

This mindset can spread to higher levels if it's allowed to. At one point during the dot-com bubble the company I worked for was acquired by one where ad sales and biz dev were granted credit for all income and everything else in the company was considered a loss. This was a _financial media_ company and without fresh content the entire thing would have keeled over immediately, but via appearing to hold the purse things had slid to the point that ads and business development had power over almost all decisions. They bought us because they were trying to move into premium subscription products like we did, but we didn't know how bad it was until we found out that every dollar we brought in was attributed to the business development group and on paper our entire subsidiary was a money hole.

From individual employees up to the C-level divisions they judged everything solely on what was easiest to put into a spreadsheet and it destroyed them in less than a year. Sad to say my hope they were unique was wildly optimistic.

My point was not that this happens as often as it should, but rather that the system we use now is built around the recognition that it’s important to do so, and consistently produces the most of that kind of result out of any of our systems. That is, if you look at market based systems against the others, in practice, they have the most people who end up wealthy due to merit — and why McDolands is one of the largest minters of “minority” millionaires ever.

This is important, because it implies the solution to our problems with the present is not to throw it out for a system that does worse asymptotically (eg, swap capitalism for socialism), but rather to further optimize and refine capitalism.

Right, that's a single company's management system, but our economic system selects for best companies == groups of people. So, no, the point was completely wrong.

If you consider the hens in the analogy to be companies (rather than people) I think it holds.

We select for companies that can outcompete other companies rather than ones that contribute the most to the system.

> If you consider the hens in the analogy to be companies (rather than people) I think it holds.

If you consider a fern to be an alligator then it's an example of a deadly reptile.

> We select for companies that can outcompete other companies rather than ones that contribute the most to the system.

I think that the whole point of our system is to ensure that firms which outcompete other firms are the ones which contribute the most total value to the system. Where this isn;t the case (e.g. as with the effects of mass advertising, monopolies &c.) it's a bug, not a feature — and should be adjusted for.

I've played a minor support role in numerous fraud and antitrust lawsuits. Although experts and counsel said a great deal about economic and social welfare, the key evidence involved what people intended and planned (based on documents, email, etc) and what they did (based on business records).

Determining which firms "contribute the most total value to the system" is just too hard to be a useful strategy.

Translating that back to the workplace, I'm more inclined to agree with TFA.

> Determining which firms "contribute the most total value to the system" is just too hard to be a useful strategy.

Yes, it is — which is why we have a free market instead of a central authority trying to determine who contributes the most. Wisdom of crowds & all that.

The companies with the most money that have been a long time can afford to buy their competition, buy influence in government and essentially rest on their laurels. I'd hardly call those companies the best.

Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft etc seem to prove your argument wrong.

Founder CEO's who built the company up from nothing tend to be good. Non founder CEO's are often the worst kind of toxic "fake it till you make it" yes-men who just play politics. The worst part is that they will fill the entirety of upper management with people like themselves. If this didn't happen then there is no way startups could ever compete with the massive resources, domain knowledge and data of incumbents.

It is correct that the economy corrects a bit against this, but the incumbent advantage is so huge that even extremely mismanaged companies can live on for decades, letting these parasites thrive, build competitive resumes and then spread to healthier companies.

Companies are rarely optimizing to give you as many eggs as possible for basically free.

Companies are optimizing for survival and draining their environment of as many resources with as little compensation they can get away with.

Companies are not optimizing for the benifit of the public. benefit for the public is PR and just like billionaire philantropes they would help humanity by magnitudes more if they paid their taxes instead of tossing cookies. No big company on earth would ever limit their usage of ressources just on their own in any significant way. if the resource runs out, they die or find another resource.

This is of course a polemic statement, and reality is more shaded than this. But capitalism can and will get nasty with increasing company size and revenue. They also get better in hiding the nasty, which doesn’t make it any easier