> it's funny because this looks like badly organized workplace

You probably should get out of the HN bubble more often, a badly organized workplace is the norm not the exception.

(I hope it doesn't come as condescending since it's not my intention)

It seriously came as condescending since I'm quite removed from HN bubble. At least you warned me, thanks.

My comment is not about the norm but about the nature of the work structure. See I've mostly been working in average (non IT) places. I can understand average salesman and clerks having troubles organizing, dealing with computer issues, bad software, and cracking under managers because they don't have Masters degrees in abstract algebra applied to relational databases. So I assumed that in an IT company the skills would influence the structure. I guess it boils down to low level politics as usual.

Sorry English isn't my mother tongue, so I didn't see a way to make it short and not condescending hence the warning.

May I interest you in one of my earlier comment to show you how dysfunctional a company can be (to put things in perspective : my boss was a software engineer before becoming the boss, our company has something like 25 millions € per year and the certificate should cost a few hundred euros) : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24220464

Dysfunctional indeed.

yeah it seems one of the most common issue.. greedy upper hierarchy causing pain everywhere below

#revolution

Governance and lack of a dictator with sane "technical debt to income" ratio. Unless you're NASA, you're not going to get there with a smart committee. You need a single person that can make the right technical decision 80% of the time and business decision 120% of the time.

Definitely the case, people don't realize how much a weak link in the chain can break the whole structure, and just how much influence the command structure can have. I've worked places where all my peers were very smart and well-qualified and still ended up outputting what boils down to smart trash because a middle manager somewhere refused to allow them to structure things well. Conway's Law isn't dependent on the group's collective IQ.

A little sensitive on this due to a recent experience where I was hired and given "ownership" only to have my very modest proposals for changes shot down if not just entirely ignored. Some "ownership"!