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Comment by grrrrrbox | Hacker News Reader

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grrrrrbox

Part of me wonders if this could be an intentional strategy at big orgs.

Step 1: Organization holds endless multi-hour meetings about intractable organizational issues.

Step 2: Stakeholders go to a bar to drink heavily and commissarate.

Step 3: Uninhibited stakeholders decide on a way to ignore the inscrutable organizational issues and Just Do It.

Step 4: Organization pats itself on the back for another successful round of all-day meetings.

Sort of a variation on the classic "beatings will continue until morale improves" strategy.

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In my experience, this usually happens because an exec sees a presentation or comes up with an idea and is like "Let's do this, we'll throw some good people at it and they'll figure out how" and then it turns out that after the org is built, hundreds of people are working on it, and they've investigated all the constraints, it's not actually possible to build the idea. The ideas that actually work usually get developed in the opposite direction, an engineer says "We can build this, let's put an early version in front of some people and see if we should."

Innovation is path-dependent, and communication/adoption/organizational/economic constraints are just as real as technical ones. It's like how pretty much any skilled programmer could've built the first version of Facebook in a weekend, but to take off, it needed to start in the highest social-status campus (Harvard) of the most networked population (college students) of early adopters (young people). That limited the pool of entrepreneurs to basically just Mark Zuckerburg and the Winklevii, and Zuckerburg got there first under somewhat dubious circumstances.

Same with a lot of discussions in politics, climate change, renewable energy, and Hacker News. An uninformed layperson looks at the problem as a whole, says "We should do this, let's throw money at it and someone will figure out how", and then we end up with a financial bubble and not a whole lot of solutions.

That people within an organization wrap their careers around an idea is a huge hazard. There is so much incentive to present success, to project positively.

We talked about Jobs' "reality distortion field" but there's a much much more mundane almost sycophantic hyping up of the future & success that is deeply deeply deeply woven into most company's genes.

Related reading: The pre-CIA OSS "Simple Sabotage Field Manual"

When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committee as large as possible — never less than five.

https://www.openculture.com/2015/12/simple-sabotage-field-ma...

Oh, we do it better. We just replace step 2 and 3 with "Executive management says the same set of empty slogans they've been saying for years whenever these problems are raised, thus all but admitting that nothing is actually going to change."

Then we add a step 5 where middle management goes away and gossips about how everything is f*cked.

>Oh, we do it better. We just replace step 2 and 3 with "Executive management says the same set of empty slogans they've been saying for years whenever these problems are raised, thus all but admitting that nothing is actually going to change."

This. I've learned to completely ignore what companies state their values are and/or these slogans they trot out. Culture isn't a poster you put on the wall.

> Culture isn't a poster you put on the wall.

Good one.

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