> this corporate disdain for quality of work environment

You may find the term "managerialism" handy. It's the belief that managers and execs are the central story of a company, that everything must flow through them, especially key decisions. And of course, that as the special people, they deserve outsized rewards. It's the dominant philosophy of US business, and although it seems eternal to us, it was invented in the 1950s and 1960s, along with the MBA that became a vital qualifier to join the managerial class. And it is definitely a class system; note who flies in "business class", for example.

It took me a long time to be able to see it, but once I did I see it all over the place. It was sort of the same struggle when I learned functional programming: I had never really thought about the rest of programming, its philosophy and value system. I was soaking in it, so I didn't need to.

The book that got me going was "Confronting Managerialism", but I'm sure there's a fair bit more out there these days: https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-Ec...

What do you call the paradigm in old-world militaries, where a lord would conscript their knights as officers during wartime; grant them "personal" budgets; and then each knight could take that budget and use it however they wished—by investing in technology, fortifications, or salaried subordinate hires, in any mix they liked, as long as it got the job done?

Yes, it's "feudalism", but it's a specific part of feudalism, that deserves to be called out separately—the idea that "everything must flow" through the org chart in a literal sense, with each node on the org-chart entirely encapsulating everything below it on the chart from the view of those above, such that the knight's liege-lord really doesn't know how they're getting the job done, just that they are or aren't; and has no actual capacity to micro-manage the HR decisions of the knight, with the lord's only controls on their knight being to change their budget, or to fire them.

In a way, it's less like what we're doing today in bigcorps, and more like what you get on the other end, when everyone is an individual, atomized contractor selling their services to everyone else. You can't see "through" a contractor-client relationship to the contractor's employees and/or subcontractors; you can only fire the contractor, or renegotiate their rate.

IMHO, while this paradigm might seem inefficient in ways, it still seems like a better "organizational architecture" than managerialism. Perhaps because, given the encapsulation, a punishment coming from your boss's boss can never "run downhill" to end up falling on you (though, nor can a reward); instead, each node on the org-chart can only rewrd/punish their direct report. At some point someone on the org-chart claims ultimate responsibility for getting the job done; and even if it came down to you, three nodes lower, failing to do it, it would still be their head, because it's their promise to their liege-lord.

Such a paradigm is inconvenient, in the sense that if your boss is fired, that means that you're out of a job—you were being paid, effectively, out of your boss's salary. But it's also convenient, in the sense that you can just apply for a job with another part of the company (really, apply to another superior to work for them), and there won't be any institutional bias (e.g. records of a "Performance Improvement Plan" against you because of a bad previous boss's poisonous office-politicking, only the personal biases of the boss's direct friends, who you can just avoid.)

Yeah there many large companies work somewhat in this way and one of the side effects is that there is a lot of competition for resources and projects and a lot of duplication. Small fiefdom get formed and battles between groups happen for control and the winner is not always based on merit. Those organization often end up starting to get dysfunctional.

In my view a larger version of that is the way the military is setup in the US. Lots of duplication. Every branch has planes and when they try to coordinate on large projects you get the F-22 project where every branch has demands that make the project take longer, more expensive and, with lots more compromises.

I think you mean the F-35 project.

But yeah, the military's a good example of taking the worst of both worlds there.

Yes indeed.

> It would still be their head, because it's their promise to their liege-lord.

In a way working at Google is like that. If your project doesn't have "impact" your manager isn't promoted and nobody in the team is.

And engineers are generally free to change team.

It does have some inconvenients and it doesn't remove politics.

There was a moment where the concept of "managerialism" was revealed to the public. It was embedded in the popular 1975 movie, Rollerball,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmTWhvWgST0&t=5m25s

I’ve seen another user on HN who grew up in the USSR call it “soviet capitalism”.

A friend of mine also recognized it in this 2015 article (see footnote 1): https://reasonandliberty.com/articles/obamacare

That's a good description. I'll also talk about "corporate feudalism", where you have the Duke of Engineering fighting with the Duke of Product, and the King/CEO must mediate the conflicts. The peasants, of course, are basically property of their various nobles.

But I really like "soviet capitalism", as it points at a key contradiction. Somehow, fans of capitalism, which maximizes surplus value by freeing individuals to make economically rational choices, rarely seem to notice that large corporations never make use of the mechanisms of capitalism, instead relying on central planning. And like the soviet era, corporate central planners often do things that are economically irrational, but useful to their careers and their quality of life.

Theory of the Firm is a huge topic in microeconomics.

I don't understand the contradiction you're getting at. The way capitalism works is that individuals are free to pursue their own interests. The way a corporation works is that they pay you a salary in order to pursue their interests. There's plenty of delegation happening in corporations, but ultimately there has to be some accountability controls since you are acting as an agent. What mechanism do you propose for leveraging individual incentives while still recognizing ownership of the corporation?

You really can't see the contradiction? I'll try again: Many fans of capitalism believe it superior to communism because free markets and high individual initiative produce better outcomes than central planning. However, they also believe in the awesomeness of corporations, which are generally run with central planning and no individual initiative.

Is that clearer?

No clearer, you didn’t answer my question. How would you structure a corporation such that it isn’t centrally planned?

I'm not interested in answering your gotcha question. If you're really interested in alternative ways of organizing work, there's a vast literature on the topic. I'm not an expert, and I'm anyway not willing to play "bring me a rock" games.

My goal was to make a particular point about an unresolved conflict in managerialist ideology. If you're still having trouble understanding the point, feel free to ask specific questions, or to try restating the point in your own terms. But if you're mainly JAQing as an argumentative technique rather than seeking to understand, then I think we're done here.

I don't think it's a "gotcha question" to ask how ideological claims are tied to reality in practice. But lets keep it high-level as you desire.

First, you describe a "key contradiction" that the capitalist economy as a whole would operate differently from a corporation. But it's unnecessarily reductive to demand such consistency. Ideologically a corporation is closer to an individual actor than to the overarching economic system imposed by government. In practice corporations grow from a single individual to huge conglomerates on the merits of their market performance, not from threat of violence, monopoly on employment, or other political power.

Second, you claim, "large corporations never make use of the mechanisms of capitalism, instead relying on central planning," which is a bold claim requiring evidence. There is tons of autonomy granted across the levels of a corporation, and a long history of conglomerates and franchises that cover the gamut of such regimes. If all of these are "central planning" then you need to explain what the alternative would be, otherwise its just a hand-wavy no-true-scotsman claim that can't be meaningfully examined or discussed.

>Many fans of capitalism believe it superior to communism because free markets and high individual initiative produce better outcomes than central planning.

You are incorrect, when you start getting into nuances. When you have the govt doing central planning, there is no way to get rid of them when they under perform. When people voluntarily form central planning organizational structures, they are eliminated by the free market if they under perform.

The difference between communism/capitalism is fundamentally of philosophy not of structure. In the former it's coerced co-operation (which almost always results in central planning) and the in the latter it is voluntary co-operation( there will be many organizational structures and some may have a central planning)

How old are you? (no I didn't make a mistake when I asked you that question)

>When you have the govt doing central planning, there is no way to get rid of them when they under perform.

All Democratic governments include a way to do exactly that - by definition. There's room for debate over how effective it actually is at removing underperformers compared to the free market, but saying it has no way to get rid of them is just untrue.

Is there? How often does the american federal government shrink? How would it shrink, if it turned out that it was too big?

In a democratic government, you're not electing the central planners. In the american government, you're not electing any of the millions of three-letter agencies that rule your life. You hire a president, and he may or may not do something, who knows.

At least a market has some contact with a ground truth of bankruptcy. If there were several competing EPA's competing for money on the basis of their efficacy, that might be interesting.

>All Democratic governments include a way to do exactly that - by definition. There's room for debate over how effective it actually is at removing underperformers compared to the free market, but saying it has no way to get rid of them is just untrue.

You are either young and naive, or an idiot. Sorry, name calling is the only way to call out ignorance. Things simply don't work the way you think it does. In theory 'democracy' promises you a lot of things, but you get very little. Most democracies for most part are sophisticated form of oligarchy where the masses are essentially fed what to think, by propaganda, 'debates' etc.

You've broken several the site guidelines in this thread. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here?

Crossing into making an argument personal is especially not ok, and we have had to ask you about this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21797575.

Dang, you may ban me if you wish. Sorry but my sense of what should be said appears to be fundamentally different from what is in the guidelines, or sensibilities of most people.

At the end of the day, everything is a tree.

Nah. Humans, who evolved in dominance hierarchies, are very inclined to see everything as a tree.

That’s a great term for it. It’s maddening to see it in the enterprise and just downright depressing when it creeps into a startup - like why do you think you’re here? To give enterprise vendors half your ebitda?

I don't think you understand what you think you understand. For one thing, if you look around, managers do not all have MBAs. The manager I had for the longest was a previous analyst who didn't even have a college degree.

The difference between classes or tribes is their value system. The more you rationalize why your tribe is superior, the less chance you will ever be able to switch to another. So ask yourself if you really want to feel superior, or to prove yourself?

> managers do not all have MBAs.

Would you care to show me where you think I claimed 100% of managers have MBAs?

> ask yourself if you really want to feel superior, or to prove yourself?

Neither. There are more things, Horatio.

>Would you care to show me where you think I claimed 100% of managers have MBAs?

You wrote it was a "vital qualifier" to join the managerial class. You didn't 100% commit to saying it was necessary, but without that implication, I don't think you have really said anything.

Well if in your view I haven't really said anything, then I don't see much need for either of us to comment further.

>> "the software literally shoots knives out of the monitor and gouges out your eyes"

That would be PeopleSoft.

A former employer decided to use it to integrate/replace multiple different working business systems they had been running for at least a decade without issue. Part of that solution involved having 'project specialists' specially trained on the system so that they could run reports for project managers, presumably while also fetching them coffee (/s).

I looked at the UI once out of curiosity but very quickly shut down my browser as my eyes started bleeding.

Part of the problem here is that there is a balance to be struck with these sorts of things: Cost, User experience, Mange-ability, and time spent shopping around rather than just going with the industry-default or one with the best sales-team. Responsible decision-makers have to make trade-offs.

When you say

> Reports...are roundly ignored

That lack of weight given to your experience as a signal of real business cost is a real problem.

So what is the solution?

1. Understand the problem they're trying to solve. What are their real motives and pressures?

2. Understand where your needs align with theirs and where they diverge in reality.

3. Tell a compelling story of where your needs are in fact aligned.

3.1) Prepare Evidence

If your case is "This tool is causes literal permanent eye injuries to our staff", then there should be written reports of those injuries. If your case is "This software package has multiple missing-affordances which present operational risks to the business", then you should be able to take screen recordings of that.

3.2) Start with why

When turning evidence into a presentation, remember that people listen better when they know why they are listening. So start with: What is at stake?

3.3) Credible language

If your words say "the UX for hundreds or thousands of others is 'the software literally shoots knives out of the monitor and gouges out your eyes'" but you can't actually back that up with the factual reality, you seem like you're exaggerating. If I think you are exaggerating, then I can't trust your words when I'm trying to understand magnitudes.

If I can't trust your words about magnitudes, then how do I give you a voice in making a well-balanced trade-off?

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Literally: (adverb)

1. In in a way of speaking that is completely accurate and unexaggerated.

2. In in a way of speaking that is exaggerated for emotional effect.

Is it the report's job to bend over backwards to prepare a series of easily digestible info-graphics to convince the manager that the decisions they've made are bad? Or is it the manager's job to follow up on decisions they've made to see how they turn out, and to investigate to see if reports of eye-gouging are substantiated? In theory, the person whose eyeballs were affected by your decisions already have a litany of responsibilities that do not cease to exist when someone makes decisions that rock a company to it's very core. Maybe instead of shlepping the responsibility of identifying the consequences of their actions downstream, they should exhibit a little initiative and attempt to take a role in evaluating whether the decision they've made was the right one for the team.

So my understanding is that you're right to say that the manager has a responsibility to listen keenly for the impacts of their decisions. I'd say it is one of their primary responsibilities as part of their responsibility for the health of their team. The

But my understanding is that in general communication is a 2-way street: Both people in a relationship should be listening with the intent to understand the others' perspective and to watch for misunderstandings. Up and down a larger organization, I think this communication tends to be harder because

1) It is often indirect -- multiple hops from individual contributor to CxO.

2) The communication that can possibly happen grows with the size of the organization.

3) People work on things that are more and more delegated. So the day-to-day problems of an accounts admin are very different from the day-to-day problems of the CFO. So the gap of "understand each others' perspectives" becomes wider and harder to jump.

All this doesn't diminish a leaders' responsibility: it raises it. But it also makes it that much harder to execute if the signals from people in the org are hard to interpret.

> A series of easily-digestible info-graphics

Are nice, but "I've noticed a serious problem. Here is a 30 minute screen-capture of it." is faster to produce and send to a direct manager and then you can (ideally) collaborate on how to raise that to the wider business.

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All this comes with the caveat that I'm an individual-contributor-level software engineer who has never managed a team for an endeavor more complex than a care-package-drive... and I might in fact be far enough on the autistic spectrum that I massively misunderstand how any of this works. (See other comment)

Sure, you're not wrong about any of this. But in GP, the commenter was essentially saying that if the CxO was not listening, it was because they didn't come with proof and business impact explicitly outlined in a convincing presentation, while I am arguing that in an emergency software-behaving-dangerously situation, it should not necessarily be the duty of the person bringing the claim to write a full report and presentation ahead of time.

Meta question: Why are we talking about people's eyeballs being literally stabbed out?

I had assumed that this was an expression of some (unknown) level of difficulty, and that if we could shift the discussion to describing that realities of that difficulty and its impacts on business operations and morale, we could get some insight.

But am I wrong?

This is the first time I've heard about "literally shooting knives and...gouging out eyes" in an IT discussion. Is this actually a thing that results from IT procurement in a literal sense? By "literal" I mean the sense that would refer to a piece of material entering the eye-goo of another human being and causing actual pain and hospitalization.

Does anyone else find it very difficult to understand situations when you are not sure at all how seriously to interpret someone? I'm aware I'm probably on the autistic spectrum...but since we're having a discussion about engineering or technology procurement, could I ask for a bit of specificity?

Is it odd to find the idea of literal eye-gouging to be out-of-place here? That it seems really extreme and like a very black-and-white way to talk about problems? Or am I just losing my mind?

Genuine question: Does my difficulty with understanding the role of literal eye-gouging in IT procurement and UX design signal that I'm becoming unhinged from reality?

The eye gouging on this case is a metaphor to stand in for "doing awful things that the software should never, ever do" which allowed them to be less specific about the exact nature of the problem that the software was having. This is because the specific problem with the software is not a detail of interest. Rather, you are supposed to take for granted that the software problem is very serious and being ignored by the superior. People will commonly use exaggerations and ridiculous metaphors to gloss over something as an unimportant detail so you, the reader, know that isn't the point they are trying to make.

I just rolled with it because it was GGP's example.

Literally means figuratively. But really vehemently figuratively. That is all.

You’re giving advice on how to be persuasive, and it’s rare I find comments as off-putting as yours.

I found it thoughtful and of much greater effort than your dismissal.

I'm curious why, if you have any insights.

The person you replied to pointed out where leaders were failing them. Rather than empathizing, you skipped to pointing out what they should be doing instead.

They made a hyperbolic comment (“literally shooting out knives”) and you’ve focused on dissecting it and accused them of using inaccurate language. Of course they’re just exaggerating when they said that even if people were losing eyes management wouldn’t care.

You switched to first person (“how can I know...”) representing the boss. This not-so-subtly puts you above the person you’re responding to.

Copy-pasting a definition comes off as pedantic.

Finally, no-one asked for an enumerated lecture on how they should be behaving.

> rather than empathizing, you skipped

hmmmm... I had tried to convey "hey, not being listened to really sucks" but now that I re-read "That lack of weight given to your experience as a signal of real business cost is a real problem." that's a pretty damn sterile way to express that. Also you're right that it should come first before the "here is this other perspective you should consider" bit.

> You switched to first person (“how can I know...”) representing the boss. This not-so-subtly puts you above the person you’re responding to.

hmmmm... really I hadn't considered that. My goal had been to suggest seeing things from the leader's perspective because they have a goal of changing leader's mind. But now that you point this out, I can see how this also creates a pompous framing.

Thank you, thats helpful to know to watch out for.

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> enumerated lecture

By this do you mean I was overly verbose? Or that having things in numbers comes off as...professorially pompous? Or both?

> no-one asked for ... how they should be behaving.

So I had interpreted the comment as a combination of an emotional vent but also a request for advice, particularly the "I'm unsure how to solve it. What do we do..."

Is this unreasonable?

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> They made a hyperbolic comment ("literally shooting knives")

> Copy-pasting a definition comes off as pedantic.

> Of course they’re just exaggerating

I... I guess I'm really struggling to cope with the loss of a word which is so dear to me and my ability to bridge gaps of understanding with my fellow human. Like, if the word "literally" no longer means.... _____

...I don't even know how to express the concept without a verbose and phrase like "a way of speaking that is completely accurate and unexaggerated." that would overtax the patience of anyone. Take that away and...as far as I can see whole swaths of meaning about the world that I'd want to express are silenced. And I let the emotion of that get away with me.

The word is dying.

And if it affects me so deeply, I should not rage against the dying of its light but actually find a way to properly grieve it on its way.

I'm sympathetic to your concern about the use of the word "literally". It's sort of a special, meta word.

But there's a subtle difference here in how they used it. They said "even if the UX is ... 'the software literally shoots knives'".

They're speaking in hyperbole, not metaphor. So "literal" is somewhat appropriate. They're not directly saying that their boss wouldn't care about a bad UI. They're exaggeratedly saying that their boss wouldn't care about literal injury.

An exaggerated hypothetical as a way of saying "Here is what I'd predict about their behavior. Here is how much I trust them."

Hmmmm... I'll chew on that for quite a while...

Literally has not meant what you perceive it to mean, as a wholly intentional and really existing condition, since at least the 18th century. Your response seems to nitpick to the point of pedantry, rather than addressing the steel-manned version of the argument, or even necessarily arguing the argument itself.

I think being able to overcome principal-agent problem is one of the things that differentiate good C-suite from a bad one.

Toddlers you say.. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in a senior leadership weekly meeting where someone thinks it would be a good idea to assign a senior executive the task of grouping together everyone’s phone plans and deciding policy on who gets the company phone, who gets reimbursed and who is sol.

Please recognize the fact that the argument you are making here is based on whataboutism and is dishonest trying to setup a us-versus-them situation and confuse the actual issue. Then you proceed to follow up with illlogical conclusions with absurdist claims ... pistol dueling has nothing to do with the ROI/TCO of an adopted SaaS.

The actual issue the parent argument is about managing diversity - and that you can never please everyone - and that isn't a pistols at dawn kind of situation.