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Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

All hierarchical systems have this fundamental problem: it's not uncommon for people of relatively low competence to get into higher-ranked positions, and then their fear of being replaced by a more competent but lower-ranked person starts dominating their decisions and behavior. In the technical and academic worlds, these tend to be people who are skilled at politics but who have poor grasp of the technical or scientific skills that their position requires.

I think flattening excessively pyramidal hierarchies are the only real solution for this problem, but that's not much comfort for those who find themselves derailed due to this dynamic.

Practically, such people tend to be very concerned about their underlings also being their 'supporters' so if you can stomach it, presenting yourself as a fawning admirer and loyal henchperson is one route forward, although likely damaging to your own mental health and productivity. Jumping ship to another berth as soon as possible is the other option (of course, don't tell anyone this is your plan, as that will spark retaliatory efforts).

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https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

>Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:

>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.

Doesn't look like a healthy division. Presumably you'll need a healthy organization to achieve the goals. Technicians will do the job, but someone will need to keep the organization in shape, it won't happen by itself.

This rule states that it will happen "by itself", in that if you look at any large organization, the dynamic described happens to be true. Of course, it happened because somebody thought that the organization had to be kept "in shape", in accordance with some "shape" he envisioned. But organizations that don't do this fizzle out and don't exist as such, so you never get to observe them.

I have my own term that dominates large hierarchies: the Middle Management Machiavelli.

These people don't care about the organization, and they don't care about producing things, or even doing their job. Their full time job is gaining power and climbing the ladder. Everyone is fighting for budget and headcount and appearances. And taking credit for things.

I would say that there are three phases:

1) the creators/doers: the company aligns to being productive and successful with these people focused on whatever does that.

2) as it increases in size, upper management transitions from industry skills to managerial people. Thus Pournelle's second class comes to dominate. Here the company still may grow and managerial tricks like acquisitions and financial cookbooking will continue growth, but nothing revolutionary. The company begins to plateau.

3) with people settling into a more fixed reporting structure, now the machiavellis will begin to fight over internal territory, and since the top managers are just sociopaths themselves, they let it happen. The company becomes a cesspool of battlegrounds, and will begin to slowly rot.

The only thing that saves companies these days is that the US economy is now structured around monopolies and cartels, so companies can obtain direct control and then establish barriers.

But the net effect of all markets being cartel/monopoly dominated is that the lack of competition means companies fall into stage 3 more easily, but can't be displaced. So the entirety of the US is now all these cartel/monopolies weighing down the country as a whole, and it becomes overall more and more corrupt.

What's the end state of this? Look at Russia.

Man, it sounds crazy, but that fits what we see with our eyes every day in the tech industry

A handful of motivated startup entrepreneurs will cobble something together in months that would've taken Microsoft or Google dozens of people years to accomplish

And in the current political climate, that startup will just get bought out or crushed by one of the megacorps instead of dethroning them

Flattening excessive hierarchical structures is the solution, but the devil is in that "excessive" qualification. It's best to eliminate narrow choke-points where a single person can make themselves a problem for the whole organization, and that may mean lopping to top of the pyramid off (a pyramid, unless truncated, narrows to a single point.)

But if you try to flatten all hierarchy entirely, you create a new sort of problem; an informal hierarchy where the only rule is to be popular: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

A flatter system actually tends to avoid the key man problem. A team of 20 is almost certain to have someone who can take the lead's job if he leaves. A team of 4, not so much.

Why is a broadly popular person worse than someone popular with execs?

Maybe what we need is... internally elected leadership!

But that's socialism, and is therefore bad because reasons.

In well designed democratic systems, there is a rigidly enforced hierarchy, ideally structured and organized to limit the power of any one person. In a structureless system those safeguards don't exist. Things might work for a while, until people make a mistake of electing a dictator who decides to hold onto power. Now you don't have a democracy anymore.

I suspect the degree of hidden incompetence in any organisation can be measured by the number of "imposter syndrome awareness training initiatives" handed down.

In fact, I've almost never worked with people who are proper charlatans, winging it and dreading exposure. They are dealt with by their peers. Most in the rank and file help each other out, confide and support, since we all suffer the same anxieties about trying to be good in a world that seldom recognises achievement.

But the higher one ascends, the more often we encounter people elevated by the Peter Principle to precarious standing, who then preempt being called-out by weaving an air of victimhood or even martyrdom around their position.

"Don't you dare question me" is implied in almost everything they do. These people at the "top" are very, very scared, can't quite understand how they got there, and imagine it will all unravel at any moment. They are also quite often frozen by fear, meaning that an eerie silence surrounds the levers of power which nobody dare touch.

I think "imposter syndrome" is a real thing. But it's much more complex and significant than we're currently understanding it. There are real imposters, who deserve to be ousted, and if we're not careful they will use "imposter syndrome" to entrench further.

This is not a good culture, either for leaders or those they lead.

Peter principle people ascend and keep in place for two reasons:

1) they are loyal and take orders from above

2) they are not a threat to those that are above, or those that are going up the ladder (assuming they can be promoted somewhere else)

Also, people tend to go into management when they have kids/get married. These people are conservative/seek stability. They are liked by management because their family ensures compliance and loyalty.

But kids and life situations and advancing age can sap people of the energy to be good at the job they once did. Plus, people do hard work to get where they want to be, and then lay off when they get there, another way that people may appear incompetent: they stopped trying hard when they reached a level of satisfaction.

Point of fact, the Peter Principle affects any organization that promotes based on merit, it's orthogonal to the considerations you mention.

* People aren't good at everything.

* Jobs at different levels in the org hierarchy require different skills.

* If people are promoted based on skill/merit they eventually arrive at a role for which they are unsuited.

> The Peter principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter, which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to "a level of respective incompetence": employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another.

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

Yep, which is why I mentioned aging/kids/family. Your merit can take you up the ladder and fatigue/complacency/situations undermine productivity.

Ah, I get it. Sorry.

  > I think flattening excessively pyramidal hierarchies are the only real solution for this problem, but that's not much comfort for those who find themselves derailed due to this dynamic.

although probably unpopular, one way around this is to have mandatory rotation of people between worker/leader roles, that way people get more equal opportunity to get leadership/management experience and politics would potentially be dampened because you'd be out of that role anyways in 6 months...

maybe that wouldn't work for every industry, but its something i've thought about a lot

This could be a great idea!

> although probably unpopular, one way around this is to have mandatory rotation of people between worker/leader roles

I think simple elections would go a long way towards worker happiness at least. Making the managers beholden to the people they manage would certainly shift dynamics.

But then, I'd also fear that a democratically ran company would struggle making hard decisions.

This has been implemented in some companies as “staff may freely move to another project led by another manager.”

This really puts an emphasis on the “leadership” part of management.

This is nice if it works, but management and leadership are specific skills that not all people have off the bat.

What is it that management does that would lend itself to transferability and rotations? If leadership’s contribution is primarily to provide updates to others or to schedule meetings, sure that’s easily replaceable. If leadership is about being empathetic and resolving conflicts, everyone brings a different style of handling this to the table and not everyone wants that sort of work. That’s the start of politics. If leadership is about making tough decisions and being held accountable for those decisions and getting teams to buy in and coordinate work around that, then switching people every six months could destroy any accountability and stability entirely.

Politics is what happens when two sides disagree, and what happens next. You aren’t going to avoid it except without groupthink. Most people are reactive to “bad” politics, just like bad sales and bad management. When it is handled well, people don’t notice it or realize it.

I don’t think this is relegated to certain industries or certain team sizes. It’s a question of roles and responsibilities, and if changing a company’s M.O. from one thing to something quite radically something else. If you’ve ever tried to change a company culture (really, a collection of a bunch of individuals’ cultures), then you know this is a huge huge task and it’s often easier/lower cost/more effective to understand your current culture and how to be most effective within that than to come in and try to change everything.

Also, Chesterton’s Fence and the like. We’ve have great social experiments in rotating leadership and in practice, people bring whatever lens they view the world to the leadership table, which is great until it isn’t.

thanks for thoughtful reply, definitely a lot to think about and consider

  > Most people are reactive to “bad” politics, just like bad sales and bad management. When it is handled well, people don’t notice it or realize it.

yes, definitely, i guess (at least when i use that word) most people probably mean "bad politics" when they say "politics" and that was what i mean... good to clarify that

  > I don’t think this is relegated to certain industries or certain team sizes. It’s a question of roles and responsibilities

good point!

  > We’ve have great social experiments in rotating leadership and in practice, people bring whatever lens they view the world to the leadership table, which is great until it isn’t.

yes, that can be an issue for sure. i guess what i was thinking was through the chance of being lead by someone who was previously under them and vice-versa there is more of a chance for managers to re-evaluate that lens and reduce those "bad" politics...

That kind of rotational system is used in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Every role, from teacher to pastor, in a local congregation is done by lay members. Because each person rotates between various roles over the years, there are no political incentives to try to climb the ranks.

It might play out differently in a workplace setting, but a rotational system works well in that religious context.

This is Sortition, a well known but rarely tried solution to the excessive competiveness of choosing leaders and winners in merit contests. Without it, selection processes devolve into a surd peacocking, competing over tiny differences and irrelevant challenges.

The department in which I got my MS did this with their department heads. Probably two thirds of the tenured professors had been dept. head, it seemed to result in a lot of respect (and sympathy) within the department.

> I think flattening excessively pyramidal hierarchies are the only real solution for this problem, but that's not much comfort for those who find themselves derailed due to this dynamic.

I don't see a problem. The SVP was correct to do what they did. IMO they should have fired this guy, not just threatened them.

This was a junior engineer posting about internal company work on social media. The junior engineer knew they were supposed to reach out to the public relations team (per the article); but the engineer kept posting anyway. The public relations point team was asking the guy to stop and he was refusing until directly threatened with termination.

How would you handle this? Imagine if someone in marketing started committing code and force pushing code to production? That's effectively what this junior engineer was doing with marketing.

Where did you get that from the article? Do you have off thread knowledge of the situation?

Author was an engineer:

> I was super excited I was actually getting an opportunity to pursue my engineering dreams. The word "engineer" was even in my job title!

He joined twitter and started sending his content to the PR team for approval:

> In fact, I was so prolific on social media that I got the attention of several industry analysts who asked how my company used social media for brand promotion and marketing. Of course, since I was in engineering, I sent these inquiries over to our PR department. ... I often tweeted about what we were doing, what the company was releasing, and what conferences I would attend. I understood the confidentiality policies at the company and never shared any confidential information. The company even gave me formal PR training so I would know what I could and couldn't say. ... After fielding several of my PR referrals, I eventually got the attention of a senior vice president at the company, let's call him Rick Dickerson. He then asked me if I could teach him how to use Twitter.

The author was clearly stepping out of their role and impacting public relations. The SVP asked them to explain what they were doing and be introduced to those the engineer was working with (in social media). Then they flagged future content and told them to stop.

The SVP was ensuring they had the information they needed to protect the company and then limit any future off-message content being produced. The SVP wanted this engineer out of the social media space and needed him stopped.

> At that moment, it became clear that the SVP didn't just want to get me away from anything social media related in the company; he wanted me out of the company entirely. He was trying to get me fired.

I'm not saying I would have done it this way, but this is what happened via the article.

That's fascinating, if completely missed that narrative. Obviously I assumed the OP was biased but I had not seen your narrative as an option from the facts, though I do now.

He was effectively self-grooming for the position, isn't that what you're supposed to do? He was getting internal training for the role and claims to follow the policies he was taught. You are making claims without evidence.

> He was getting internal training for the role and claims to follow the policies he was taught.

His posts were being flagged by the PR team.

I suspect it's because he was discussing products without going through the PR team (because they would have told him to stop).

All my arguments are from the article itself.

> He was effectively self-grooming for the position, isn't that what you're supposed to do?

If someone from marketing came down and started force pushing code to production, would that be self-grooming? No, you'd expect a PR and some review process, which wasn't occurring here.

The PR team never flagged anything. The SVP backchanneled unfounded complaints to my director in order to get me in trouble. The PR team loved me.

> ... I showed Rick the platform's essential functions. Eventually, he created the company's Social Media Council, and I was appointed as one of the founding members.

It seems the SVP was in company representative in charge of PR / social media? If so, he was the party responsible for the team and thus "the team"?

> The SVP backchanneled unfounded complaints to my director in order to get me in trouble.

Seems like the SVP was going through the command chain to direct his complaints / concerns to you. That's the typical way corporate structures work.

What was flagged?

> Eventually, he acquired the tweets in question, and we were both stunned about why these benign tweets, which were clearly not about the company's financials, were being flagged. Then, he finally confided in me that the person who reported this to him was the SVP I had been working with previously, Rick.

If you are taking them at their word, this came directly from SVP and not some PR policy AND it was not related to financials. So are you calling OP a liar or not?

> What was flagged?

Your seemed to imply above that the SVP got involved because of already-flagged tweets, whereas the part of the story you've quoted happened after the SVP had not only met the author and appointed him to the company's social media council, but after the SVP started ghosting him.

The causality you're implying (if not explying) seems inverted.

> His posts were being flagged by the PR team.

The article specifically says that they were not.

If any of that had happened the order of events would have been different.

He would have received warnings that he was violating company policy. The SVP would have addressed him directly and asked him to stop tweeting about the company instead of asking him to be taught. His manager wouldn't have been confused about the complaint.

None of your arguments are from the article. You're going way out of your way to assume the engineer is in the wrong and omitting information in the article.

I don't get it. All I see is an SVP, who has the power to just say "Stop it" apparently jealous of this engineer's popularity and pushing him out to remove the personal threat, not company threat.

> started sending his content to the PR team for approval:

are you reading something I'm not?

It says other companies were asking HIM how his company used socials for PR.

> I sent these inquiries over to our PR department

He directed these companies over to their PR department for an actual answer, he didn't send his posts over to the PR department.

> After fielding several of my PR referrals, I eventually got the attention of a senior vice president (...) He then asked me if I could teach him how to use Twitter.

This SVP noticed he was basically sending them free marketing and decided it would be great to learn how to use it himself.

Nothing in your quote says he was sending his posts over to PR for approval at all.

What internal work was he posting?

The article goes out of its way to tell us that this guy received extensive training in what he was and was not allowed to say on social media from the PR team, and was doing well enough that he was a founding member of that company’s social media team.

I’m not sure where you’re drawing your conclusion from.

I replied in this thread to a different comment, but suffice to say, we're only seeing this engineers view on the topic.

From a company perspective, how do you handle someone who's gained a social media following and is posting about the company and acting as a company spokesman without being approved to do so.

You would collect all the information you can, then tell the guy to knock it off or be fired. That appears to be what happened.

Well no you wouldn't say "company financials" to escalate it, you would just be generic and say "proprietary information". There was enough suspicious stuff going on (being uninvited from internal group chats) that you can't chalk it up to one-off accidental miscommunications.

Besides, unless I misunderstood, it doesn't seem like the "knock it off" was directly communicated to the employee by the svp at any point, which a good faith manager would probably do, unless they have a severe nonconfrontatiomality issue (some managers do)

For the record. I had zero infractions on social. None. All allegations were made up and unfounded.

I believe you, I'm trying to counter the narrative that there is some way you could have misinterpreted otherwise "normal" administrative disciplinary communication

If the company was publicly traded and if the author was discussing unreleased products and speaking as a company employee, then yes it could impact the FTC reports (i.e. financials). However, those details weren't shared.

(Speaking of which, if this was AMD -- I likely traded on this guys information lol I made a boat load off employees sharing information they shouldn't have publicly)

> There was enough suspicious stuff going on (being uninvited from internal group chats) that you can't chalk it up to one-off accidental miscommunications.

We have no idea what actually happened, what we can say is that from the author's own statement(s) they continued to post on social media and stopped sending it to the PR team. To me, this reads that the author was given repeated hints / directly told to stop and wasn't listening. My guess is the training was, "hey you're probably not supposed to be posting this, review the training please".

That said, we don't know. I'm not saying this was handled well, but this definitely wasn't being "bullied" out of a job. Their job was engineering, they were pushed out of social media, at best; after not being hired for it.

I don't know if you're ESL or if you just didn't read the article but none of what you wrote is in the article. You're assuming so much here.

Strong disagreement. If there's any problem (which there usually isn't) you bring them into the loop. I've seen this repeatedly even at huge companies like Microsoft.

Whatever the specifics of this particular situation, it may be worth observing that this seems to be in the context of rather early social media days. "When Twitter was launched, I was an early adopter."

And a lot of companies were really feeling their way into social media at that point (and by no means were their strategies necessarily broadly agreed to internally). I've seen first hand how many companies did not have well-articulated and specific policies and individuals were sort of on their own to do the "right thing" the interpretation of which was likely to differ depending upon what exec you asked.

It's hard to say what exactly happened in this case but in the mid- to late-2000s, it would have been very easy for an enthusiastic social media user posting about company matters to run afoul of someone used to company communications happening through tightly controlled channels.

From what the engineer explicitly details and according to your own logical rules that you laid out.. nothing was violated.

You're simply saying you believe the engineer is lying and dishonest. This is possible but there's nothing compelling about your assumption unless you provide evidence that supports it. Otherwise it's just sort of a random assumption.

I mean, Yeah sure, for example, I could assume that he also has anger issue problems that he's unaware about, but that's a random assumption... Why would anyone care? In short I'm saying what compelling evidence do you have to make your assumption more relevant?

This is the kind of risk-averse, backstabbing claptrap that prevents companies and individuals from rising above local maxima.

> without being approved to do so

You'd think if he wasn't approved to do so then they would've actually told him to knock it off and not, you know, give him PR training and put him on a social media council.

Imagine the scenario where they did do this. And the employee was intransigent and didn't follow orders. Do you think it's possible this sort of person would also present a skewed account of what happened?

You have no idea if the perspective presented it accurate.

> Do you think it's possible this sort of person would also present a skewed account of what happened?

Sure, but it's pretty hard to skew being included in the very part of an organization that presumably influences how said organization represents itself on social media. Are you insinuating that the author is outright lying about that?

This is ridiculous. If you have a problem with what someone is doing you say "I have a problem with what you're doing, for the following reasons." You don't drop oblique threats or do the other nonsense mentioned in the article.

Obviously we don't know the other side of the story but you are making a massive leap from what is presented and ignoring the completely reasonable alternatives to what the SVP is reported to have done.

Think of the game theory and organizational evolution in such a flat hierarchy, especially when the flat section is a middle management level.

This flat hierarchy works at the low level. It already does almost everywhere on the border of "production workers" and "low management".

But in the middle management, the incentive is promotion and control. You start out with a flattened hierarchy, and say 20 managers vying for promotion, well, you probably won't get promoted. Then why try hard? Uhoh, now most of your managers will either:

1) leave

2) fight over / jockey over being the "senior level" of the 20 underlings

3) stop trying

4) embezzle

5) gradually conspire to "unflatten" and add more levels, gain control (solid line or dotted line) to the territory of your peers

> fear of being replaced

I saw the most extreme example of low competence bullying. A manager with less than 1 year of experience fired a contractor project manager who was a previous energy company CEO, turn-around CEO, and company board member/advisor. The guy was fixing some of the tangled bureaucratic work flows (which made everyone's lives better) when he got the axe.

Why would a CEO waste their time as a low level project manager?

You introduced 'low level', and GP said 'contractor', maybe the fees were enormous ('I turned around XYZ Corp as CEO, and I can come in temporarily and do it for you too').

(Also note that what organisations term a 'project' can vary a hell of a lot.)

1. His kid was finishing high school and didn't want to move out of a small metro with limited jobs.

2. Company health insurance + family member with chronic disease.

3. He was personal friends with the VP which made his firing potentially career ending for the new manager.

There are people you meet in your career that are a privilege to work with like this guy.

I'm looking for people with knowledge or researching the dynamics of work groups. I find there's so much inefficiency that there must be a better way. So much human waste due to bad hierarchies.

Sometimes people "badly" promoted don't even seek power, they just end up at that spot, and the heat makes them turn sour, or stiff, because there something in us that makes us want to keep appearances up (and also probably the financial benefits, but I'm not even sure, and some did say so to me, that it's worth the money)

Many business schools will have a research group focusing on organizational behavior, which will likely have information of interest for you.

For example >> https://eller.arizona.edu/departments-research/centers-labs/...

I dug a bit last year but I wasn't hooked, maybe I should revisit.

the tyranny of structurelessness is arguably worse because there will always be hierarchies and in a so-called flat org they just become invisible and unaccountable

It is really easy to tell apart people who despise office politics and people who don't. I have a theory that the best way to run an organization is to remove anyone who doesn't actively hate that stuff regardless of competence level.

putting the face on to placate the egos of management is extraordinarily difficult if you’re interested in uncomplicated versions of right and wrong.

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