Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

For the last 4 years I have worked for the first time in my career as employee of a big corporation. The "managing class" of MBAs reminds me of the way a communist state like East Germany was run. Centralized decision making, information withholding, the desire to plan out everything for years, saying one thing while meaning the opposite, hanging up motivational posters "we are innovative" while squashing innovation, ignoring of inconvenient facts and so on. All that comes with the appearance of "management science" and its own insider language.

I always find it a very negative sign for a company, when the corridors are getting filled with pep talk posters, which could have come directly from the latest management magazine.

For me it is a clear sign, that innovation and real work done in the company is going rapidly downwards.

Continuously repeating, how good "we" are clearly says, that the company is currently "not good enough".

What might work in personal psychology, does not in corporations, where everything else tells the workers, that their work does not count, but only the work of the poster creators.

Can confirm.

I've heard that my company has been told to tighten the belt, that there are a lot of positions in the company that don't produce value to paying customers. At pretty much the same time, I'm seeing a wave of self-aggrandizing motivational posters. I think I see a connection.

A woman of my acquaintance, a substitute teacher in one of the local school systems, has said that the number of posters about values and respect is in inverse proportion to the quality of the schooling.

Universities and Hospitals are infected with them. Like full blown infestation.

Yep! But his is not like an autoimmune disorder (e.g. type 1 diabetes). It's more like an acquire disease (i.e. type 2 diabetes), for which we fully understand how to prevent and alleviate, but somehow do not implement the necessary measures.

Guess whose job it is to implement the necessary measures.

Let's sort that at the preliminary scoping meeting before assigning it a team at the next quarterly.

It's more like a host/parasite relationship.

The cure, in any case (unionization of the value producers), isn't particularly obvious to most.

How do you unionize just the value producers, without also unionizing (and entrenching) layers of middle management?

Why would middle management need unionization?

Would a senior programmer be ejected from the union when they are promoted to say a project manager? I'm just not sure you can isolate value producers.

The key question isn't "do they produce value?", it's "can they hire and fire?"

Once people acquire power over resources/people the shift from value creation to value extraction is pretty natural.

> The key question isn't "do they produce value?", it's "can they hire and fire?"

This is traditionally the line that people draw, yes, but I think the reasons for that come from the other end.

That's the thing; the manager who manages the cashiers at the grocery store doesn't have more power than the individual contributor software engineer who writes the software for the registers, not in any reasonable sense. That's not why the the line is traditionally drawn where it is.

The line is traditionally drawn where it is because it is management's job to act as a proxy for the will and interests of the owners, and pretending to do that while being in the same union as the workers would be very difficult, or at the very least, quite awkward.

The power relationship a cashier has with his hiring/firing manager at a grocery store is not materially different to the relationship a software developer has with his hiring/firing manager.

In both cases the managers' job is to keep the workers in line.

>The power relationship a cashier has with his hiring/firing manager at a grocery store is not materially different to the relationship a software developer has with his hiring/firing manager.

I disagree.

>In both cases the managers' job is to keep the workers in line.

While I agree with this part, I think the differences in the pay of the worker makes for a hugely different power dynamic. a period of unemployment is a lot easier to take if you can live on 1/4th of what you get paid.

Right, they are forming professional societies.

(Like SHRM: https://www.shrm.org/ , which just showed a TV advertisement, for some reason)

As long as companies maintain a pyramid structure management layers will be outnumbered by workers. It balances things automatically.

It is my belief that after the creation of the NLRB this is no longer possible, though people did it before that.

Except the unions will also grow a management structure or a political class, and eventually the two hierarchies get stuck in an uncomfortable stalemate.

Now you know why healthcare and education costs so much in America.

It is spreading to the rest of the world under the "new public management" moniker.

Effectively it is a scheme of metrics, and attached incentives and punishments, cooked up by MBAs to emulate market mechanics within public services.

Well, yes. This is because both are examples of command economies and both evolve additional non-hierarchical mechanisms to achieve actual outcomes.

In any large enterprise there is always a Nomenklatura who actually "make things happen".

When explaining to people that trying, for the billionth time, to create The Perfect Reward Scheme won't work, I put it this way: GOSPLAN had decades, and access to unlimited men with guns and dogs, to make its plans work. And it failed.

So what's the alternative?

Push decision making out as far as possible.

Don't participate

I've been part of that group within large organizations at a few different levels.

It's both an intensely rewarding experience -- you get to fix things that are broken and get a lot of creative license. Simultaneously, it's also intensely depressing, as you get to learn how the metaphorical sausage is made.

not to discount your experience, but how do you know that your sense of being part of the core group that actually "makes things happen" isnt shared by many others who also feel that they belong to the group that really runs the place?

I'm sure that people feel that way. And to some extent they are correct -- ultimately they keep the trains running. But few other teams can do anything new in a reasonable period.

Unfortunately I think that "truth" is a tough nut to crack in political scenarios. Perception generally rules the day, and most of these teams that play that role are successful in acquiring the trappings of corporate power -- fast action on HR, access to the decision makers/purse stringers, and perks.

It doesn't last forever, because like in the Soviet system, these things depend on powerful patrons.

In a world ruled by perception, how may a servant of the truth best fulfill his duty?

You mean the sausage is acutally metaphorical? I had assumed otherwise.

do your attempts in explaining this make any difference at all in terms of making things happen? or are they also failures?

> GOSPLAN had decades, and access to unlimited men with guns and dogs, to make its plans work. And it failed.

I am no fan of oppressive regimes, centralised planning or Stalinism, but it always grinds my gears when people point to the collapse of the Soviet Union as the One, Absolute proof that centralised planning is always doomed to failure.

While I'm sure that the hierarchy and command structure of the government and economy had their parts to play in the collapse, their importance is often overplayed by gargantuan proportions.

At the time of the October Revolution, Russia was a largely agrarian society, which henceforth industrialised and developed remarkably quickly under Stalinist Five-Year-Plans, in the midst of the Great Depression. However, it was still poor and barely industrialised when it was decimated by WWII. Despite this, it recovered to become a major world power that challenged the US during its peak.

US GDP has consistently been 3-5 times USSR GDP during the the latter's entire period of existence. Despite this, the pressures of the Cold War forced USSR military spending to match US spending, reaching more than 25% of GDP.

Any country in a similar position would be doomed to crack under the economic strain, regardless of the structure of government or economy.

>>doomed to crack under the economic strain

Actually any normal country would not have wanted to match the US's military spending. It is precisely, this crazy, paranoid, militaristic bureaucracy that people criticize - not the mention any human rights issues.

'Any normal country' doesn't have it's ideological basis declared US public enemy #1, and its growing influence deemed by a "crazy, paranoid militaristic bureaucracy" to be the greatest threat civilization has ever faced.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare

The Red Scare wasn't pure paranoia: it was in reaction to a legitimate threat. The COMINTERN really did want to overthrow the governments of all other countries, and the members thereof really did work towards that goal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_International

Indeed, there was quite a bit of govenment overthrowing, mostly at gunpoint and backed by the USSR. Of the The Black Book of Communism's 94 million estimated victims 74m were outside the USSR so there were issues there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism

As mentioned by OP the US invested considerably less resources as a fraction of the total trying to fight communism. Contemporary Russian domestic propaganda draws a direct line between the so called "heroic" sacrifices the Soviet people made ( a majority of which were self inflicted) and the sacrifices Russians will yet again make due to EU import bans - which we recall is due to them invading the Ukraine.

>Actually any normal country would not have wanted to match the US's military spending.

It's pretty normal behavior for most countries to react defensively and aggressively when threatened.

Hence:

* USA puts nukes in Turkey => USSR puts nukes in Cuba.

* USA puts nukes on the Korean DMZ => North Korea creates nuclear weapons program.

What's fucking weird is how American propaganda manages to successfully depict these kinds of actions as the unprovoked behaviors of crazed madmen.

The same kind of attitude towards Iran is common, too.

> USA puts nukes in Turkey => USSR puts nukes in Cuba.

Well, let's not forget Hungary and Poland, shall we?

> The same kind of attitude towards Iran is common, too.

Iran is pretty agressive in its rethoric on how it wants to wipe out a certain democracy by the Mediterranean.

Do you have more details about this?

Wikipedia has:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union#Khrushchev_era

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Soviet_Union_(1...

"let's not forget Hungary and Poland"

Hungary and Poland had nukes??

"Iran ... wants to wipe out a certain..."

Iran wants to wipe out, US are wiping out the whole countries and don't seem to know how to stop.

> Hungary and Poland had nukes??

No, they tried to get independent from USSR. Even the somewhat liberal USSR government at that time decided to crush them.

> Iran wants to wipe out, US are wiping out the whole countries and don't seem to know how to stop.

I cannot and will not defend everything US does and I freely admit they have made a lot of questionable moves over the years. Still broadly hyperbolic statements like yours doesn't help I think. US is more of a clumsy and somewhat selfish giant than an evil giant but many (including myself and my parents) are very happy that US has intervened in a number of conflicts as well as made clear that the rest of Europe wasn't up for taking. (Modern Russia doesn't seem to evil either but former USSR proved to be a legitimate source of concern for smaller countries with common borders.)

First, a bit of nitpicking. You probably meant Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Two notorious rebellions took place is 50's and 60's.

1. Either way, the original argument was that some Soviet actions were reactions to actions of US (nukes in Cuba etc). No one says that Soviets were saints.

2. To simple people without guns in Iraq, Lybia and Syria the clumsiness of US may be a weak consolation.

As a side note, looks like people are blind to what is happening in the world before their eyes. We are all smart in hindsight, e.g. blaming Soviets for the crap they have done. But, what amazes me, is that actions of US, brutal, barbarian bombings, regime changes, plunging countries and millions of people into chaos, are not condemned at all! On the contrary, US is very proud of what they are doing (looks like they are going into 4/8 more years of it). It will probably take a number of years before people are able to reflect on what damage US has done in the past 20 years.

I meant Hungary and Poland. Czechoslovakia was 1968, long after the missile crisis.

> 1. Either way, the original argument was that some Soviet actions were reactions to actions of US (nukes in Cuba etc). No one says that Soviets were saints.

Agree. Only, however dumb or not - I can't say, US decision to move nukes to Europe was most likely a reaction to something as well. That "something" might very well have been USSR aggressively expanding into Europe.

> 2. To simple people without guns in Iraq, Lybia and Syria the clumsiness of US may be a weak consolation.

Totally agree, only your original post was a bit hyperbolic as well as made it seem like US was doing this with evil intents (no doubt some US citizens, also in the Military complex are evil but I don't approve of the whole nation being more evil than others.)

> But, what amazes me, is that actions of US, brutal, barbarian bombings, regime changes, plunging countries and millions of people into chaos, are not condemned at all!

Don't know where you have been, around here they are condemned a lot for all kinds of good reasons, just like e.g. Israel, mentioned upthread. And just like Israel they get a lot of additional hate from what seems to be uncritical underdog-supporters.

I don't say any of them don't deserve critic; I just say we shouldn't judge them without taking into account the whole situation.

PS: Same happens with Microsoft, and as someone who has disliked MS strongly for most of my career I appreciate that I can like them now, it gives me hope that I am not a totally hopeless fanboy in other situations either.

>Iran is pretty agressive in its rethoric on how it wants to wipe out a certain democracy by the Mediterranean.

Apartheid. Palestinians are under occupation, will not get their own state and cannot vote.

The rhetoric is only aggressive once it's gone through the media filter. What they actually said is closer in meaning to what some wet Jewish New York liberals say - that Israel "the Jewish state" should be consigned to the dustbin of history.

Well, anytime Israel give them a little more room they use it to move their rocket launchers closer. That is not a particularly smart move unless you want to keep the conflict going.

Also: Arab citizens in Israel can vote, - Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank can vote in Gaza.

As for the media filter that is really interesting (I think there is a grain of truth to it) but more than that you have to show evidence.

I think it was the fall in oil prices in the late 70s/early 80s - combined with a ruinous invasion of Afghanistan - that finally did in the Soviet Union economically. Putin should take note.

Otherwise - despite the appalling human cost of projects such as the White Sea Canal and farm collectivisation - the USSR did indeed become a global power if only for a short period. Red Plenty [1] is an excellent book on the subject.

[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Red-Plenty-Francis-Spufford/dp/0571...

An interesting review of "Red Plenty" can be found at http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/24/book-review-red-plenty/

Yeah, it's funny how many people look at a country that went from agrarian society to first spacefaring society & 2nd most powerful nation in ~40 years and go "obviously their economic system was an abject failure".

The level of growth experienced by the SU was unsurpassed. In the 50s the US media was fretting over it being "too successful".

in the 30s, a lot of European media was reporting about happy life of working people in the USSR (see 'useful idiots')

Indeed, the apparent success of the Soviet NHS model, for example, in fighting Typhoid, Typhus and Tuberculosis is partly what led to the structure of the British NHS.

Had the Tories had their way in the 40s (and without a clear example of success to point to, they may have), the UK would now have an insurance based "show me the money and we treat you" system - the exact kind which Americans are all apparently very happy with.

> Yeah, it's funny how many people look at a country that went from agrarian society to first spacefaring society & 2nd most powerful nation in ~40 years and go "obviously their economic system was an abject failure".

The U.S. went from agrarian society to the first spacefaring society to make it to the Moon, and became the most powerful nation on earth, in ~40 years.

The issue is not that the Soviets didn't develop: it's that they didn't develop as quickly as they could have, had their central planning not retarded their growth rate. Not to mention their utterly murderous regime.

> The issue is not that the Soviets didn't develop: it's that they didn't develop as quickly as they could have, had their central planning not retarded their growth rate

Even if centralised planning is doomed to retard growth rates(a hypothesis I consider quite plausible), you cannot reasonably confirm that hypothesis, or the extent of the retardation, using the example of Soviet Russia. There were too many factors involved for you to lay so much of the blame on centralised planning.

There were multiple geopolitical and economic factors involved, including the fact that USSR was trying to match the military and diplomatic might of an economy triple its size, fought wasteful wars(Wars are a centralized decision in almost all modern countries) and suffered from variations in the rates of global commodities. These factors alone would most likely decimate a country no matter what its economic system.

The US benefited from WW2, while USSR had a large amount of their infrastructure destroyed and 20 million of most productive members of society killed in their prime. Yet they still pulled it off.

The growth was so incredible that even though the Soviet Union's economy was about half of that in the US in 1961, Samuelson estimated Russia would overtake the US sometime in 1984-1997.

It's pretty remarkable that after 30 years consistently growing much faster than the United States, in 1990 the USSR economy was still half as large!

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/01/sov...

> However, it was still poor and barely industrialised when it was decimated by WWII.

The country was killing itself at a fantastic rate during the 30's purges prior to WWII. Stalins complete failure to listen to the advice of the remaining army staff ('that army we can see is about to invade') helped make the situation even more desperate.

Being able to buy toilet paper was a major win (in the '80s), that was planning economy at its finest, not military spending. Or people who had to commute from countryside to large cities to buy cheese and sausage. Source: born in the USSR.

> At the time of the October Revolution, Russia was a largely agrarian society, which henceforth industrialised and developed remarkably quickly under Stalinist Five-Year-Plans, in the midst of the Great Depression. However, it was still poor and barely industrialised when it was decimated by WWII. Despite this, it recovered to become a major world power that challenged the US during its peak.

Apologists for the Soviet regime always like to bring up how quickly it developed, but they ignore a) that prior to the Great War Russia was actually quite advanced and b) how quick its development could have been with a market economy. Yes, Russia in 1984 was extremely advanced compared to Russia in 1919 — but the free world in 1984 was far more advanced than the free world in 1919.

a.) In 1919 Russia was not nearly as advanced as the US or Europe.

b.) Unlike the US, Soviet Union came out of WW2 with cities destroyed, and 20% of its population killed, most of them able-bodied men in their prime.

Yet, by 1984, the USSR had:

- free universal healthcare

- largely egalitarian society with very little inequality

- free, excellent education system, from K through PhD

- women treated equally in the workforce unlike the West

- walkable cities with very good public transit

What the free world had:

- Start of Reagonomics and Thatcherism era

- Plenty of cheap consumer goods to buy and waste

- Fantastic entertainment industry

- White flight and suburban sprawl

- Beginning of War on Drugs, sponsorship of Islamic extremism in Afghanistan

I guess my point is that one should probably define "advanced" before proceeding to discuss it.

>Equal Pay Act 1970

>National Health Service 1946-1948

>Defining Thatcherism as bad

All before 1984.

You can't take all the bad parts of the 'West', however you define it, and compare it with a single country.

USSR GDP was a total lie like the foam missiles. On a totally centralized economy the statistics depend on the Government and of course, they are not real.

Specially under Stalin, nobody ever gave a bad number, because he would be murdered as incompetent,this fact led to consequences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

The people in power in the US knew that was totally bogus, but the defense industry benefited immensely from this belief.

Look for Argentina recently(Kirchner) where people has gone to prison, their properties confiscated just for publicizing data that went against the official data by law.

Something similar happens in China today, and as centralization increases, in the Western world too. The data from central banks are becoming more and more "hocus pocus".

Don't pin the Holodomor on timid statisticians and misunderstandings. It was deliberate, as is stated in the lede of the very article you link to: "actions such as rejection of outside aid, confiscation of all household foodstuffs, and restriction of population movement confer intent, defining the famine as genocide"

GOSPLAN had decades, and access to unlimited men with guns and dogs, to make its plans work. And it failed.

For a while (until the early 80s) things did work reasonably well in the Soviet Union, compared to its overall condition at the end of WW II.

Don't blame the MBA degree as the root cause of these symptoms. I have had a Mathematics PhD manager who exemplified these exact traits to a T. Doing an MBA is just a symptom of the ladder-climbing mentality, just like the buzzword bingo, the elevation of ignorance to a virtue and the do-as-we-say-not-as-we-do leadership.

Amen. That's a very good, concise, and apt description. It mirrors my own not inconsiderable experience.

I simply can't take it anymore.

>The "managing class" of MBAs reminds me of the way a communist state like East Germany was run. Centralized decision making, information withholding, the desire to plan out everything for years, saying one thing while meaning the opposite, hanging up motivational posters "we are innovative" while squashing innovation, ignoring of inconvenient facts and so on.

Huh? What's wrong with centralized decision making and planning out everything for years? The rest I can agree with, but 1) in any company, you need centralized decision making or you won't get anything done; the point of a company is not to be a democracy, it's to be a machine that generates profit, and centralized decision making accomplishes that. And 2) what can possibly be wrong with planning things out far ahead? I worked at Intel for years and they did this, and it worked, for the most part. (Obviously, circumstances forced plans to be altered or even abandoned at times.) If you don't have a plan several years out of what you want to be doing, you're not going to accomplish anything big. How do you think the Moon missions could have worked if they didn't plan that out years in advance?

It sounds to me like you're comparing whatever little podunk 20-person company you used to work at with the big corporation you find yourself in now, and you're trying to assume that everything the little company did was somehow correct. It wasn't; the big company got to be a big company by doing something right.

Many of the other things you complain about just sound like typical bad management, and things you'll find in any organization that isn't perfect. Information withholding and saying one thing and meaning the opposite and ignoring inconvenient facts: aren't those common with the US government? I saw these in several small companies I've worked in (and big companies too). It's not unique to big companies. There's definitely more of it in poorly-run companies, which should be no surprise. There's no shortage of poorly-run companies out there, big and small.

As for the motivational posters, that's a fad (though admittedly it's been around a good 15-20 years now). I recommend getting your own motivational posters and hanging them in your cubicle (if you even have a cubicle; working at big companies was a lot nicer 10-20 years ago before this idiotic "open plan office" craze). You can get some excellent posters [here](https://www.despair.com/collections/demotivators).

(What kind of site calling itself "Hacker News" doesn't even support some kind of basic markup for embedding links? Come on guys.)

> What's wrong with centralized decision making and planning out everything for years? The rest I can agree with, but 1) in any company, you need centralized decision making or you won't get anything done; the point of a company is not to be a democracy, it's to be a machine that generates profit, and centralized decision making accomplishes that.

No it doesn't. Top-level decision makers are poorly informed about what's possible and what's actually effective. Complete top-down decision making is Dilbert incarnate.

Top-level executives need to make the goals of the company clear to team managers, and that's not just "profit", and they need to set the constraints that any direction in pursuit of those goals must satisfy (such as legal or marketing requirements), and let the engineers find optimal solutions within that space. Engineers excel at finding effective solutions given a set of constraints, executives excel at defining business policies that effectively shape a successful business. Let each employ their appropriate skill set.

> And 2) what can possibly be wrong with planning things out far ahead?

Inflexibility to changing market conditions. Having invested time, money and effort into forming such an intricate long-term plan drives us to stupidly believing sunk cost fallacies, and ignore evidence of ineffectiveness.

No. Top management sees the company in quite a different view than its employee. They also see their own future. So, what they decide for the company might actually not much to do with what the company does. For example, the president of a big car company can have a big interest in making polluting car. So it'll make sure the company is a bit dysfunctional on environment protection. Of course he won't say it. In exchange, the top manager will be rewarded and might event get some more power to help the company in a more positive way later on. I experienced that 2 times. One in a huge japanese tyre company : we were given small book explaining us how the company was ecological, while a te the same time rubber extraction was pursued in an absolute non ecological way. In a gov't company, we're continually told to work for those we help but at the same time, the top mangement decision make that work super difficult.

My thought is : manager are human, and their in position where they have lots of pressure (they've chosen that). so most of them behave has human : they do mistakes, they act more selfishly than they care to admit and they mask the truth with lies or on-purpose ignorance.

As I prefer to act with real good intention and produce tangible results, I know I won't ever make it to the top. I'm not interested in making compromise.

Moreover, when I'm with people who are at the top or who want to be at the top, I can clearly sense that their core-values are very different, even opposite of mines... And I'm sure they instantly feel I'm not part of the tribe. Because that's a tribe with values, customs, dress, etc.

> They also see their own future. So, what they decide for the company might actually not much to do with what the company does.

That's exactly what I said executives should do: set goals and constraints on how to fulfill those goals. You're just saying that companies can change goals, and that's fine. You just tell your employees that your goals are changing, so they shift focus to the new goals. You're still not making decisions for them other than overall direction.

I think what Wiz21 is getting at is that the interests of the company and the interests of its senior managers are not always aligned.

Sure, but I thought we were talking about what makes for good management. Bad managers either need to be reformed or fired.

The big problem is that bad managers get their by sacrificing the company's success for their own success, and focusing on managing perception as opposed to creating value.

For instance if you were a V.P. at an mortgage company you could push your underlings to make bad loans. Even though in the long term it will hurt the company when those individuals default, in the short-term you will look awesome.

Or for instance when a V.P.s boss makes a wide ranging decision about the company will move in a new direction. For instance "To the cloud". You can argue about how that doesn't make sense for your part of the organization and have you're boss and grand-boss think of you as "Not a team player". Or you can cheer-lead a decision you know is wrong, knowing that afterwards you can produce some great powerpoints slides about how failure was outside of your control.

> For instance if you were a V.P. at an mortgage company you could push your underlings to make bad loans. Even though in the long term it will hurt the company when those individuals default, in the short-term you will look awesome.

Having metrics to measure success is of course important. While micro metrics like lines of code produced per day are easily gamed, metrics like number of successful projects divided by the estimated risk are not. For the mortgage, number of mortgages divided my estimated risk is similar, and would easily identify the managers that are putting the company at risk to game their metrics.

> Or for instance when a V.P.s boss makes a wide ranging decision about the company will move in a new direction. For instance "To the cloud".

Do you mean that the CEO is declaring that the company should use the cloud for all of their products, or that the company is to become a cloud provider? Because the former is exactly the wrong type of decision that I've been talking about, and the latter is exactly the kind of decision they should make.

>Inflexibility to changing market conditions. Having invested time, money and effort into forming such an intricate long-term plan drives us to stupidly believing sunk cost fallacies, and ignore evidence of ineffectiveness.

Oh please. I've worked in giant companies that planned things years in advance. The plans changed frequently, with market conditions. Planning things far ahead doesn't mean you're rigidly bound to those plans, it just means you have goals you've set and you're going to work towards unless things change, forcing you to alter those plans.

By your logic, you shouldn't bother going to college, because things might change and planning things out 4-5 years in advance like that is futile. Lots of people go to college and end up changing their major or doing things somewhat differently while they're there; not going to college at all because this might happen would be stupid.

>Top-level decision makers are poorly informed about what's possible and what's actually effective. Complete top-down decision making is Dilbert incarnate.

Centralized planning doesn't necessarily mean micromanagement. It just means not acting like Microsoft with the different business units all competing with each other and stabbing each other in the back.

> Planning things far ahead doesn't mean you're rigidly bound to those plans, it just means you have goals you've set and you're going to work towards unless things change, forcing you to alter those plans.

Except that's not what the original poster was talking about. The OP specifically referenced the centralized planning of communist states, which are poorly informed and inflexible to changing conditions, just like I said, and they employ deceptive propaganda even among the people that are supposed to help them realize their plans.

Nothing wrong with having a rough strategy that you openly share with your employees so you can all work towards realizing. That's exactly the kind of planning I described in fact.

Then the OP was making a strawman argument. I've worked in big companies, and I've seen long-term planning, and it's not like what he complains about. He's alleging that all big companies use this mythical rigid central planning, and it simply isn't true, he doesn't even have any examples.

If big companies were all like failed communist states, then these big companies would have failed long ago. They haven't. Maybe some have, and maybe some small fraction of those did fail partially due to overly-rigid long-term planning, but to claim that this is a common problem among big companies is quite wrong IMO.

The problem is when the decision makers are removed from daily events, and they stick dogmatically to the plan and try to change reality to fit said plan.

A non-soviet example may well be McNamara's time as Secretary of Defense.

As one anecdote put it, by the time the report of a shooting of a elderly lady with a bicycle in a Vietnamese village had reached the DoD, it had become a ageless, genderless, combatant, with a grenade...

As far as I know "podunk" is an insult, is that what you intended?

My problem with the planning obsession is that planning is really hard in software development. It's different in production. There you can predict the future fairly well.

When I tell some middle managers that I don't know exactly how long a software project will take they insist on endless planning meetings that hold up work even more. In the end it's best to make up an estimate so the team can go back to work. All teams are forced to do so so in the end you just wait for the first team to fall behind schedule and take the blame.

The whole system is pretty much everybody lying to each other and hoping they won't fall first.

> When I tell some middle managers that I don't know exactly how long a software project will take they insist on endless planning meetings that hold up work even more.

It's middle management's job to come up with the estimate and give that to upper management. They should not be asking team leads for project-level estimates, team leads are too close to see the forest for the trees. Any time a manager asks me for a number, I ask them to try to come up with one, because their guess is as good as mine, so he might as well come up with it.

To management thinking, not knowing how long something is going to take is indicative of not understanding the problem enough. The solution to a lack of understanding is to get the right people in the room together to articulate what they know about it, figure out what's missing, and work out a correcting plan. In other words, a meeting.

What's different about software development is that it more resembles research than manufacturing. If you were to ask Thomas Edison while he was testing thousands of materials for filaments how long it was going to take before he has the next light bulb, he'd have angrily thrown you out of the room. Yet we expect programmers to be able to answer that question all the time.

The best estimate you'd get for when Edison would be done would be from someone close to him, but not actually working with him, say his secretary or wife. They'd be able to notice all the little things that he can't because he's not paying attention to them.

So in software development, you'd ask the lowest level manager, rather than coder, for a ballpark number. All that person needs to do is look over the history of the group and come up with a number in line with other projects with similar scopes. If there's no project with a similar scope, then a meeting or two is needed in order to work out how to break up the project into more-manageable chunks.

It doesn't make a difference if you ask the coder, the secretary or some manager as long as they are allowed to give a ballpark estimate. That's easy. The problem starts once somebody doesn't accept that ballpark number and wants more precise data. Then you start pouring over velocity data and define the project architecture to a level you can't reasonably know at this stage.

The solution usually is to make up some stuff but tell people about some nonsense methodology you used. It works but it's just lying. It would be much better if management methodologies would be able to accept uncertainty. Agile was one way to do this but it has evolved into a micromanagement tool.

> The problem starts once somebody doesn't accept that ballpark number and wants more precise data.

That's crappy management. If my boss did that to me, it's time for a closed-door meeting where we have a come-to-Jesus on how software development is conducted. If I can't show them the light, I start sending out resumes because my working relationship with my boss is trashed and life is only going to get more painful over time.

> What's wrong with centralized decision making and planning out everything for years?

Read Hayek's "The Use of Knowledge in Society"; it's about exactly this.

Yeah nah. (That's australian for I see what you're saying but you're wrong[1]). One goal of senior management is to try to determine an organisation's trajectory and make decisions that put it on that trajectory in the hopefully medium to long term - but beware short term financial incentives. Junior management has the same kind of thing going fractal style. Bonus points if that trajectory doesn't work out (do you have one or more fallbacks?). While centralised decision making may enable the whole long term planning thing to be realised, in some situations it's not possible (e.g. medical organisation where you have to give substantial numbers of staff very high levels of autonomy) or desirable (e.g. where you need to make staff at the minimum feel that they're in control of their own destiny because for example they're difficult to replace). In fact regarding the second point, I was involved in a project a while ago where the goal was to improve the autonomy of steel workers in order to effect organisational improvement. So there's a whole movement in management which is being fairly widely adopted to avoid excessive centralised planning.

[1] c.f. "nah yeah" - "what you're saying sounds very wrong but it's probably right"

> Yeah nah.

Australian? Yeah nah. It's Kiwi as

"Yeah no" is now fairly common in American English too. See, e.g.: http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2013/05/yeah-no.html

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