"First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization. "

It's the Iron Law of Bureaucracy https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

I found this revelatory at one point in my career, but this shouldn't have been a surprise as the administrators literally control all promotions and will thus turn the organization into one that serves the managerial class over actual technical ability and knowledge.

As a technical worker, your best option is to try to become extremely valuable and make it known that your continued employment is predicated upon promotions when they should be due. For example, if senior engineer is available at 5 years and you're working your butt off, you need to make it known that you're expecting it or they may just push it out to 6 years if they think they won't lose you. If you're really good at your job and it would be difficult to replace you and put your manager behind schedule, they'll be incentivized to take care of you. It's all a game.

On the flip side... don't try this if they're trying to get rid of you. Be prepared to walk away if you can if they're not taking care of you.

Another thing I learned is that if you want to join management, you have to pretty much stop acting technical. They usually don't like adding technical staff to management as 1.) it may make them look incompetent, 2.) you provide more value to the company doing technical work at a lower salary, and 3.) it shows you might actually not be a good fit for that kind of work, although this isn't necessarily true.

Not all unions are perfect and there are certainly issues. That being said, the American solution of getting rid of them entirely is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Individual employees just do not have the negotiating heft of a corporation, particularly in the US with employer provided healthcare and whatnot.

this has lots of "real" in it but details matter. At a formative time, American politics specifically substituted "safe" leadership in union upper management.. either connected to party politics or just directly from old-Right Europe who had lots of experience dealing with workers and systems. Yes, there were real Mafia families in the Teamsters, in other words. The fiery and violent revolutions across the world did have their impacts on America.

Since the 1980s, evolution via bureaucracy and golf clubs, court cases and election results seem to have been more the driving force.. people can only get so fat before their eyes start to glaze over and trivial concerns take the airtime.

> The more complete and histocally evidenced rule is that all institutions eventually just work to continue and/or expand their existence in itself.

This isn’t more complete and historically evidenced. This is a Law Named After Person/Dilbert Quip, which is the pit of cliches that a lot of HN comments fall into on sociology.

What, other than just cynicism,[1] have these Stated Truisms contributed to? These rules are so rigid (so they can be pithy, snappy) that they sound immutable. Is the point only to, say, feel smug about how the manager directly above you has been promoted to his level of incompetence?

[1] Cynicism is fine and good. But just-cynicism has no way of moving beyond itself to a better state. The difference between critique and throwing your arms up.

> They can get founded in the genuine interests of some cause (and often are), but each transition in leadership tends to find itself more professionalized in some way and more divorced from the founding cause, with process (and/or corruption) becoming their effective mandate instead.

Nothing in history is ever just a downward spiral of corruption and rigidity. Outside things happen, revolts happen, things are replaced, systems are overturned.

That quip is a cynic joke, not a statement of historical fact. There are many organizations that simply kill themselves and die out via people leaving as the original purpose don't matter anymore.

Quip? Joke? I don't know what you mean.

It's an extensively treated paradigm in sociology. With sociology being a "soft" science and not having access to a methodology as rigorous as physics, it's certainly contestable and there are of course many sociologists who have made arguments against it or that simply don't consider it convincing, but it's not just some casual insight and certainly not someone's "joke".

The reason I mentioned it, in any case, was to relate it to previous commentor's supposition that unions were excluded from their "rule" (which was a casual insight). You needn't take either this perspective nor theirs as true yourself, but there's not much case to exempt unions if you're going to start looking through the world from that lens in the first place.

Maybe in some pop sociology books, but actual real sociology as a science does not treat it as an established truth at all. The sociology being "soft" does not mean you can cherry pick what suits you and pretend there is consensus about your cherry pick.

In that sense, not even physics is like physics.

Also, the actual sociology, if anything, tend to be very nuanced where majority of the claims are packed into conditionals and probabilities. As a science, it super rarely makes simplistic claims like this.