It’s an anecdote but it’s also what I heard from my doctor dad working in the NHS. There was a time when the UK health system was actually run by doctors or people with medical knowledge. Now it’s MBAs and generalist managers. It doesn’t work, all it does is increase overhead, both in staff and bureaucracy.

In his opinion that’s what ruined the NHS not underfunding.

Business and management courses are not necessarily good.

> Business and management courses are not necessarily good.

I suspect it's a sort of "penny wise and pound foolish" thing. You end up optimizing the small stuff (cost cutting, etc) and you lose the ability to drive big innovations.

I worked in a UK government office once where they had stopped giving teabags to staff as a cost-cutting measure. The project was £50 million over budget. That's a lot of teabags.

That's tragically hilarious.

I interned at a large well-known tech company. When I started, in the break room, there was a Keurig machine and they would keep a large drawer stocked with plenty of k-cups.

Then one day, they stopped refilling it, saying they're cutting costs. I was like, really? Each employee, at most, is drinking $2 worth of k-cups/day. Meanwhile, you're paying them at LEAST $400/day.

The kicker is that the location had a cafeteria where they could get free coffee, but it was a much longer round trip to get there. It could easily be a 10+ minute ordeal. The productivity loss outdid any savings gains.

I suspect there was a big meeting with a bunch of managers about the need to make up a 7-figure budget deficit and 50 of the 60 minutes was spent bikeshedding about k-cups. :)

Much like social media in general, "sending a signal" is much more important than doing anything.

Doctors abuse the system to their own benefit when given the chance. Putting them in charge produces terrible results as well.

> Now it’s MBAs and generalist managers. It doesn’t work, all it does is increase overhead

It's kind of interesting being in a small to mid-size organisation and leading a team where the need to introduce this kind of middle management is asserting itself. I'm instinctively resisting it but the downsides are clear. I have way too many direct reports. I am constantly bogged down in generic meetings - everything from desk arrangements, COVID safety, leave management, etc. Meanwhile most of my staff spend large amounts of their time blocked from their top priority task because they lack input or direction. My unique technical skills are being completely wasted. Yet it kills me that we might decide we have to blow $150k/year which could employ another coal-face engineer simply because we can't figure out how to organise ourselves better.

So should I put in place a generic middle manager to deal with all this stuff? Or not? It may seem like it's obvious in happens to large megacorps that the end result of this is bad. But you can see completely how you end up there. Certainly the people who are doing that are getting way more cred in the organisation and arguably actually getting more done in real terms.

Jack Welch was a PhD chemical engineer, not an MBA.

It’s easy to pick a group to ‘other’ and blame them for everything.

Really, it’s a general organizational scaling issue IMO.

What's fascinating is how long it took for this generation of giants for people to realise it's just the same big enterprise world again, just more shiny. Maybe it's because they revolutionised corporate marketing: Google was a symbol for my generation, a fun tech oriented company completely in rupture with what was before (i.e. wear a suit in a cubicle). The cycle is also complete with "modern" tech stacks starting to feel like enterprise framework at the time like JBoss/Hibernate/...

The conjoined triangles of Success!!