[HN Gopher] How to identify an immoral maze
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How to identify an immoral maze
Author : apsec112
Score : 83 points
Date : 2020-01-14 04:01 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (thezvi.wordpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (thezvi.wordpress.com)
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Are there large revenue rich organizations that are NOT immoral
| mazes?
|
| It's like democracy being the worst form of government, except
| all the others.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Are there large revenue rich organizations that are NOT
| immoral mazes?
|
| Because both depth of organization _and_ (the author doesn 't
| point to this, but it's my experience of the effect the author
| describes) span of control contribute to the effect, there
| aren't large organizations beyond a certain size (independent
| of revenue) that aren't immoral mazes.
|
| You can balance depth and span to mitigate the problem, but
| limiting organization size is the only way to actually avoid
| it.
| npo9 wrote:
| I'm unsure if how many layers deep alone is a good indicator of
| if it's an immoral maze.
|
| I once worked with a company that had 50 employees and the
| hierarchy was five people deep. I once worked in a company with
| 10,000 employees and the hierarchy was six deep.
|
| The larger company with one more layer was much better.
| dvirsky wrote:
| Yes, the number of levels needs to be normalized by the size of
| the org (although probably some log of the size, it should not
| grow linearly, following the nature of an org tree). If one
| manager has around 5 direct reports on average, you need seven
| levels to span 80K employees. If a single manager has 10 direct
| reports you still need five levels to reach 100K (though I
| doubt there is a single 100K+ employee company that is only
| five levels deep)
| LanceH wrote:
| There is probably some room for differentiation between a
| purely personnel layer and a product layer. If you have 5
| people, you need someone who can provide a room and some
| computers. If you have 500 people, you need a layer that can
| provision a building. Personnel wise it makes sense to have
| another layer -- but it doesn't follow that the product itself
| needs another approval layer.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > A world without slack is not a place one wants to be.
|
| My first thought was, "no, I'd love to be able to delete the
| damned thing" and then I realized he wasn't talking about the
| chat app...
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| The suggestion of not having anything to do with these mazes is
| in effect a suggestion not to have anything to do with any
| extremely successful company as far as I can figure out - so, at
| what monetary point will a company become a maze?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| It's not at a monetary point. It's usually when the company has
| succeeded to the point that it's not in danger of failing, even
| if inefficiency sets in. Once it reaches that point, then it's
| a matter of how long it takes the culture to rot. (Most
| cultures rot eventually.)
|
| I wonder if "immoral maze" explains our politics as well, and
| if it has the same cause. The US hasn't been in danger of
| failing, even if the government became insanely inefficient.
| LanceH wrote:
| I worked briefly for a very large company where the bulk of the
| effort was around supply chain management. The actual production
| of the product was simple and relatively solved long ago -- it
| was so much more about branding and distribution. Early on I
| started to wonder if any of the people I was working with had
| ever stepped foot in one of the warehouses we were managing
| software for; or met a user of that same software.
|
| The whole place was rife with consultants and contractors who had
| been working there for years upon years. I was there as a
| consultant (glorified contractor) and it quickly became apparent
| that I was there to be an evil consultant. The goal wasn't to
| produce the system they needed, it was to produce billable hours
| and ingratiate ourselves to the host such that we could land
| another project. We were using whole off-shore teams to do work
| which might have been done by one or two people locally. It was
| all about getting the margins on the highest headcount possible.
| For all of this, I was a BA, one layer off the "line" of people
| actually producing. The people above me only talked to other
| people who were neither buying the product nor producing it,
| exactly as the article describes. They were less interested in
| the product getting made than their ability to show that things
| were going well.
|
| I found (actual) work elsewhere.
|
| Half joking aside: this also reminds me of the java
| frameworks/architectures that got me to hate the language so
| much.
| chasd00 wrote:
| hah reminds me of the demotivator "Consulting, if you're not a
| part of the solution there's money to be made prolonging the
| problem"
|
| I'm in consulting and there is a lot of that. Especially in big
| companies on big projects where entire teams can hide and just
| bill hours and a deliverable never materializes. The
| consultants have no emotional investment in the client and so
| as long as the invoices are paid no one is going to care.
|
| Now, withhold payment until milestones are met or the
| deliverable is in production and everyone gets much more
| interested in productivity.
| superbrane wrote:
| in many corporations of this kind it's all about: - over-
| billing the customer (see Acc. and their legendary $20-30M site
| that was not working) - internal power plays between managers
| who want to show-off managing as much headcount as possible, as
| that is correlated with paycheck etc. etc.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| Based on the article, it looks like the fundamental problem is
| lack of "skin in the game," and the author notes it as a defense
| against becoming an immoral maze. But, how can one identify "skin
| in the game," particularly 2+ levels of the hierarchy above
| oneself?
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| A core implication of the article's thesis is that it's very
| hard in general. Otherwise, the owners of any organization
| would just issue an order saying "everyone's gotta have skin in
| the game". (In fact they do try to issue that order; a typical
| corporate middle manager will get quite a bit of their
| compensation from performance-based programs and company stock
| they're culturally discouraged from selling.)
| nathan_compton wrote:
| What is disturbing to me about the idea of having skin in the
| game is that I really struggle to imagine a work situation in
| which I would even _want_ to have skin in the game. Skin in the
| game means responsibility at some personal level, and the absence
| of that personal responsibility is precisely the nice thing
| (perhaps the only nice thing) about wage labor.
| chasd00 wrote:
| yeah "responsibility at some personal level" is very _very_
| expensive in my book. The compensation would have to be
| extraordinary.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Well, if you save the company a million dollars, do you get
| even .01% of that?
|
| Nope.
|
| Large companies are like communism, even when there are
| opportunities for internal competition, it is stamped out. And
| for all the talk of "market pay" and "executive rentention
| bonuses", there is little in the way of incentivizing employees
| with revenue sharing tied to what they produce.
|
| Which underlines the entrenched oligarchy of the USA. Like a
| meta-conway's law, our government is just a reflection of large
| corporations in the age of cartel/monopoly/consolidation in
| virtually all sectors.
| awinter-py wrote:
| responsibility sucks I'll agree, but autonomy and profit
| participation are cool
| nathan_compton wrote:
| I wish I could join a cooperative which could afford to pay
| my current salary.
| rictic wrote:
| Two ways to have a healthy organization that promotes skin in
| the game: workers receiving shares in the company as
| compensation, and having a healthy, system of promotion.
|
| Expanding on that second one, if the most reliable way to get
| promoted is to create something of value to the company, that's
| a very good sign. If the main way to get promoted is for your
| boss to like you or owe you a favor, run away.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| Receiving shares in the company only creates skin in the game
| when the typical worker can materially affect outcomes. My
| employer has ~$1T market cap. I can move the needle on the
| projects close to me, but I can't do much to move that market
| cap, or our earnings, or anything else. I receive shares each
| quarter, and happily sell them immediately, precisely because
| I have next to no control over the outcomes. They are guided
| by systemic forces and leaders much more powerful than me.
|
| (I don't see any of this as a problem, BTW, but I think it's
| worth pointing out.)
| dvirsky wrote:
| Side question - won't it be more profitable to sell some
| and keep some for potential future profits, so the overall
| risk is lower but you still profit potentially?
| awb wrote:
| Right. Immoral is a loaded term. Some might like and seek out
| these mazes.
|
| Digging holes and filling them back up might not help humanity
| progress, but it probably doesn't have much stress either.
| Raemon777 wrote:
| The point is less about the bullshit-job nature, and more
| about how the job warps you as a person (i.e. to make it to
| upper management, you end up having to do unethical things,
| and rearrange your life/hobbies/etc to be the things that get
| you ahead)
| dfraser992 wrote:
| I wonder if the writers of HBO's Succession have read this series
| of web page? I have only glanced at a few pages TBH, but this
| immediately came to mind.
| eddywebs wrote:
| I was in an immoral maze once, had I read this article before I
| might have still been there (for good reasons).
| cbanek wrote:
| I remember looking at this when I joined MSFT. I think I was 7
| management links away from billg. And yes, many of the middle
| managers fought with each other constantly, not knowing what was
| actually happening on the coding level.
|
| We had these huge reorgs where all the middle managers would get
| shuffled, but almost all the ICs and their leads would be doing
| the same thing as always, maybe once every other year.
|
| Although this article leaves out that even in a flat
| organization, if you have people that have it out for you, or are
| trying to manipulate you, they are essentially building an
| immoral maze as well (and one that by design you will be found
| lacking).
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| I once read that nerds never understood that popular people
| spent all their time being popular, while nerds actually were
| educating themselves.
|
| Likewise, middle management machiavellis spend all their time
| scheming for their promotion and enrichment, so any manager
| that is trying to "do good" will be stamped out because they
| just don't have the time to compete with full-time schemers.
|
| Eventually all managers of morality will be ejected from that
| organization.
| blowski wrote:
| You're absolutely right - I'd much rather work in a formal
| hierarchy than an informal one.
| bartread wrote:
| For those of you wondering why informal hierarchies can often
| be worse than formal hierarchies I offer an old but still
| very relevant essay by Jo Freeman, "The Tyranny of
| Structurelessness":
| https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
| chadash wrote:
| Number of levels in the hierarchy seems like a bad way to
| determine this. I've worked in a company with 500 employees (and
| three levels) and _lots_ of bureaucracy and a company with
| 100,000+ employees (~6-8 levels depending on your division) with
| relatively little bureaucracy (yes, on occasion, I ran in to bad
| cases of it, but it didn 't effect my day-to-day work).
|
| It's simply not possible to have 100,000+ employees and less than
| 6 levels, unless you have managers with tons of employees. But it
| _is_ possible to be in a division of a large company where your
| group has relative autonomy and are empowered to do what they
| need to do. In my case, there were about 20 of us inside of a
| larger 500 person group. 95% of decisions were made within the 20
| person group (obviously this is an approximation). Another 4%
| were made at the 500 person group management level. 1% were made
| by company-wide executives. In other words, my boss was
| accountable for most of what we did. On occasion, he 's need to
| go to his boss for something. And very rarely, his boss would
| need to escalate to higher ups (where there were another 3 or 4
| levels to the CEO). This company was very well run, but there are
| much smaller companies with fewer levels in the hierarchy and
| lots more bureaucracy.
| throwawaypa123 wrote:
| the 6 layers isn't really true, in part due to line managers
| can manage 15-30 people. If everyone is doing the same job that
| is fairly rote a single line manager can handle a lot of
| people, reducing layers. Additional CEOs tend to have a lot of
| direct reports.
|
| Sample Example
|
| (0 Layer) CEO --> 10 Direct reports is typical for large
| publicly traded companies.
|
| (1 Layer) C-Level --> 6-8 (10,000 / 8 --> 1,250)
|
| (2 Layer) SVP / VP -- > 6-8 (1250 / 6 --> ~200)
|
| (3 Layer) Middle management (200/ 6 --> ~30)
|
| (4 Layer) Line managers (1-25)
| dtnewman wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > _With only one level, there's nothing to worry about. With
| only two levels, a boss and those who report to the boss, the
| boss has skin in the game, no boss causing problems for them,
| and not enough reason to reward bad outcomes. With three
| levels, there are middle managers in the second layer, so one
| should be wary._
|
| Based on this wording, it seems like the CEO and the people
| under the line managers count as levels ( _levels_ though
| maybe not _levels of middle management_ ). By that reasoning,
| this structure would indeed be 6 layers.
|
| In reality, it varies by division if you are in a large
| company. If you join at the bottom of the legal department at
| Google, you probably have fewer layers above you than if you
| are a junior dev working on android.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > the 6 layers isn't really true, in part due to line
| managers can manage 15-30 people
|
| Yes it is, IMO; any layer above line managers over
| nonprofessional staff should have a span of control not
| greater than about 3-5 subordinate managers with full-depth
| (1 level less than the manager) organizations and a similar
| number of supporting staff that either have no reports of
| their own or supervise organizations about 2-3 levels less
| deep than the manager above them. Yes, lots of real
| organizations have broader spans of control, but lots of real
| organizations also are what the author describes as "immoral
| mazes".
| awinter-py wrote:
| would be interesting to see some AI-assisted version of
| holacracy replace middle managers -- you'd still have low-level
| team leads and high-level strategy people, but a lot of the
| informational glue and project updates could be taken over by
| machines
|
| you'd need to go into a project like that (1) believing that
| middle managers eventually suppress more value than they add
| and (2) you're okay operating in a random mix of cowboy team
| leads and inconsistent organizational glue between them.
|
| you'd set broad parameters like 'don't over-duplicate work',
| 'pick projects that are more or less on-topic with our
| company', 'get third party verification of plans and
| estimates'. Firing could be some mix of 'future needs',
| performance and random. Moving teams would happen based on an
| internal market of skills & personnel budget.
|
| might be chaos but it could be fun.
| alecbenzer wrote:
| Given the author admits:
|
| > Note that those outside the company, such as investors or
| regulators, seem like they should effectively count as a level
| under some circumstances, but not under others.
|
| I think there's obviously some room to fudge with what the
| exact boundaries of the "organization" are. So yeah, maybe a
| sufficiently-empowered department head functions more like a
| CEO/boss.
| Misdicorl wrote:
| > It's simply not possible to have 100,000+ employees and less
| than 6 levels, unless you have managers with tons of employees
|
| Math does not check out. 5 levels for 100k employees results in
| 10 reports per manager (assuming a top level with 10 people
| rather than 1, which is approximately correct given
| CEO/CTO/CIO/etc/etc/etc). Maybe 10 qualifies as 'tons' for you?
| Going down to 4 levels gives 18 reports per manager, which
| feels a little closer to 'tons'.
| chadash wrote:
| I think we agree in principle, just different understanding
| of how to count levels. Based on the article, a company with
| a boss and one employee is two levels ("With only two levels,
| a boss and those who report to the boss..."). So for 100,000
| people, with average 10 employees per manager:
|
| 1 Big Boss (Level 1)
|
| 10 (Level 2)
|
| 100 (Level 3)
|
| 1000 (Level 4)
|
| 10000 (Level 5)
|
| 100000 (Level 6)
|
| That's six levels. In practice, some people will have more
| than 10 and some less, but unless the people under you are
| doing menial work, I think 10 is probably middle of the road.
| cbhl wrote:
| In my experience, if you are stuck in a maze, you need your
| manager to show you the way through the maze. They'll only
| have enough time to show you the way if the number of reports
| is bounded.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Math does not check out. 5 levels for 100k employees
| results in 10 reports per manager
|
| It results in 10 reports _with full-depth organizations_ per
| manager, which is _a lot_ at any level except line managers.
|
| Except for line managers of nonprofessional staff, 5 full-
| depth subordinate organizations and 5 support staff or
| shallow (~2-3 levels less than a full-depth subordinate
| organizations) is about the limit of what is reasonable. A
| full-depth span of control at 10 at each level , with 6
| levels, is pretty certain to be an "immoral maze".
| dvirsky wrote:
| 10 direct reports on average is a lot. It might be okay at
| the highest levels where you mostly make strategic decisions,
| but it's too much for a manager that's involved in day to day
| processes and decisions.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Number of levels in the hierarchy seems like a bad way to
| determine this.
|
| It's incomplete as a measure of the problem, but it's
| definitely a valid measure of a key risk factor. The span of
| control (# of direct reports) of each supervisor in a direct
| chain of command from the employee to the top-level manager is
| _also_ a measure (higher is worse), as is the "span of
| reporting" (the number of supervisors[1] to which each employee
| reports) from the employee up to the top-level manager (again,
| more is worse, and there is a big jump from the condition where
| the maximum is 1 anywhere in the chain and the condition where
| the maximum is > 1.)
|
| [1] this includes both "people" and "functional" managers where
| those roles are distinguished, as well as people that aren't
| characterized as having reporting relationships but from whom
| the employee is expected in practice to take direct direction.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| >It's simply not possible to have 100,000+ employees and less
| than 6 levels, unless you have managers with tons of employees
|
| But I think that MS had 13 levels (IIRC joel) in 2006-ish,
| while the company had 7 in 1994 when he arrived ...
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