But even a pretty low level developer is going to end up making important business decisions just incidentally as part of their job, because it's hard to specify out every little decision that could impact the business without basically doing the dev's job for them.
Businesses can embrace that or they can ignore it at their peril.
Everybody organizes people, decide how work should be done, and has to make a lot of little decisions that nobody could anticipate. Not with the same leverage as developers, but with important consequences too. Somehow, management experts can't accept this.
We establish a difference between jobs where that training is relatively short (and thus we can expect it to happen on-site by the company who can hire people from other positions and have them do the new job) and the jobs where that training takes many years and thus requires significant pre-commitment and long-term planning to ensure that they can be filled.
For the purposes of crude statistics we pick an arbitrary line and label the jobs with <1 year of job-specific training required (starting from generic knowledge e.g. highschool or a degree in some other field) as "unskilled" and >1 year job-specific training required as "skilled"; but the key point is that there is a substantial qualitative difference between roles where you can "swap" people from one industry to another, and roles where that doesn't make sense at scale - while some individuals do switch high-investment careers, you're not going to solve a pandemic-prelate doctor shortage by re-purposing excess lawyers, but in that same pandemic you can solve a delivery driver shortage by re-purposing excess cashiers. Similarly in IT, the jobs which can be done by putting someone through an x-week boot camp do need different treatment from managers and policy-makers than the tech jobs which do require much more training and/or experience.
That's how it's done at all the US software companies I've worked at, including Microsoft and some startups.
My current company does has done away with job-titles entirely and we make up whatever we want on our business-cards (within reason).
Bad managers thinks a managers role is all about making decisions. Great managers knows it's about enabling employees: great managers act more like secretaries, making sure everybody knows everything they need.
When a manager can communicate what is going on and what the strategy is, most decisions become obvious and this results in everybody agreeing to what needs to be done.
When the new CEO was brought on they started to listen to the junior executives. They poison the well by stating things like how what he is doing isn't necessary or slowing down their own goals.
Just humans being humans. As a result he will likely leave in <2 years. I don't doubt that his old org will falter extremely fast.
It seems like well run orgs with less people are highly susceptible to quick change than large useless behemoths. Seems paradoxical, but a common fate at many companies/orgs.
That’s because large corporations are typically run like communist states, where the workers have little say in their own work, and tyrannical unelected leadership sets up hierarchies that reward political infighting to build power.
Why don’t corporations try democracy and bottom-up decision-making? Is corporate capitalism incompatible with democracy?
You're describing capitalism, actually.
> try democracy and bottom-up decision-making
Those are called worker co-ops. They're very socialistic. And democratic. It's quite possible for them to be profitable, too.
You'd think the success of his model would be used elsewhere to reduce employer costs and increase retention (no SWE has left his org in 4 years). Instead other petty executives get pissy and poison the well.
Something is extremely off with modern corporate America.