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Comment by amrocha | Hacker News Reader

I love that when it comes to tech companies, managers are all bumbling idiots and should all be fired to allow the workers to get the job done.

But as soon as a working class business tries that, it apparently doesn't work in the long term.

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In small groups where decisions must be made in a timely and decisive manner, a mediocre leader is often better than the best democratic committee. Even in programming teams, somebody needs to put their foot down eventually or things will be bikeshedded to death. FOSS projects too, generally benefit from a BDFL.

Be careful about extrapolating this out to the rule of countries though, dictatorships can make things go south worse than any other system. At least with FOSS projects, people can fork without fleeing their homes.

Sounds like you change opinions to match whatever argument you want to support. No flame intended, that's just what it sounds like.

Are you alluding to some particular hypocrisy in my comment history, or do you consider me a hypocritical merely because I have nuanced opinions on leadership that depend on the stakes and context?

Democracy is a fine way to run a nation, but not a ship, plane or platoon of soldiers. Context is everything. If you think there is any one single system of leadership that is ideal in any conceivable situation, then I fear you must be a clueless ideologue. Lacking an appreciation for nuance is the mark of shallow thinker.

In what way? There are plenty of blue-collar fields where this applies. In many of them, when the workers outgrow the competency of their bosses, they just strike out on their own and become another competitive force (GCs/SCs, carpet workers, plumbers, truckers, etc). This isn't as possible with large tech companies since they require large capital to startup/compete and generally have to worry about getting sued for intellectual property infringements; but it does happen.

HN is composed of individuals, it's not a hive mind. Different people have different opinions.

Besides, comments here tend to complain about middle management being useless, not leadership.

I know, but I feel like the community sentiment is fairly consistent on these topics. I could be wrong though.

Also, restaurant owners are not much different from middle managers in terms of scale of responsibility.

Leadership is more useless than middle management.

There’s plenty of bad leadership, but there’re also some great leaders.

People can ignore idiot colleagues. It's harder to ignore idiot bosses.

Ergo, people bitch more about bosses than colleagues, even though there are bad examples of both.

Is it that typing javascript into computers is the source of all knowledge, or does knowledge lead to typing javascript into computers?

Man may never know.

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