Hacker News Reader

Comment by stinkytaco | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to see a post like this on HN where someone revisits their organization 10 years later and decides if they were right or not.

It's not that all organizations don't have disfunction, but as a younger person I was very fixated on everything I saw that was wrong and ignored either the problems I myself was introducing which were (and probably still are) numerous or the systems and programs that made the organization successful. Now that I'm older and in a position with a different perspective, I'm far less likely to find systemic fault. Perhaps I'm just lucky in my career atc? I don't have a blog to go back to, but this author seems insightful and I'd like to see what they think in 5 or 10 years.

View on HN

There is systemic fault. It starts with hierarchical structuring. It doesn't mean that hierarchies are inherently bad, but there are consequences from that and the additional things that people usually imply that come with it. This can seriously hamper productivity, for example, even in the small scale. Once you start to think that through you will also see how far reaching the agile manifesto truly is and that the content in there is nothing short of "nuclear" for typical corpo structuring and processes that are developed around it.

If you have no explicit hierarchy then an implicit hierarchy will start to form in most cases, which can be even worse. In many cases you have both.

Those things become inevitable when a 3rd layer of management appears (for a total of 4 layers).

I'm not sure how far you can push a 3-layered organization, but it's absolutely something that exists on some scale, without a phantom organization appearing.

yep.

https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

I’m not convinced this is inevitable, but it certainly feels it within the current system. Co-ops exist and can be very successful.

Hierarchies can be time-limited, or democratically limited, it just depends on the legal and organisational framework.

> in most cases

I'd say "in evey case". And I'd say this happens whether or not there's an explicit hierarchy. Being articulate, or having knowledge or contacts, will get you more attention. The only way to mitigate this is through explicit processes, which have to be regularly reviewed. Meetings have to be chaired strictly. Everybody has to sign-up to the agreed processes.

These processes are time-consuming, and decisions can be slow. It becomes worse the bigger the organisation. I don't know how non-hierarchical decision-making can work in an enterprise where there are significant assets at stake; I've only ever seen it work in voluntary political associations in which non-hierarchical organisation is one of the prime objectives.

Question is then, why do you have both? Where does this implicit "hierarchy" come from? It is simple: As soon as you have multiple people working on a problem there are communication requirements. You can organize things in a way that they support these requirements or you can just let them figure out how to adapt their needs around some existing hierarchy. Now which one do you think is more efficient?

Hierarchies are just an organizational pattern, a tool. There are neither a religion or "set in stone" as many think, they create communication choke points, induce unnecessary communication, cause "not our responsibility" mentality that may result in things falling through the cracks, have often the "Chinese whispers" problem to it, and so on. You cannot treat every problem like a nail just because your only tool is a hammer.

> You can organize things in a way that they support these requirements or you can just let them figure out how to adapt their needs around some existing hierarchy. Now which one do you think is more efficient?

I think this is a pretty great statement of the converse of Conway's Law[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

>Where does this implicit "hierarchy" come from?

Because people want to exercise their influence, or protect their position, and form relationships and alliances.

What happens to be wrong is all relative to everything else wrong in the larger organization.

It's been my experience that a lot of an organization's internal messaging is crafted to be a distraction from either really bad stuff that is going on or simply because management can't or doesn't want to do productive work.

From that perspective, any dysfunction in a small team is inconsequential to the organization.

As a younger person that was the sort of stuff I fixated on, until I learned that the various very trusted professional corporate suit folks acting like HQ were doing illegal shit, destroying their families with workplace affairs, bullying everyone around them, and ruining other people's work.

What happens when you were right?

Eg, as an SDE in 2017 you worked on Amazon Device’s econometrics team and were screaming the entire org was in trouble — but the PhD economists and directors ignored you.

We’re at 5 years, a gutted department, billions in losses, etc. Now what?

Or you warned WarnerMedia executives about their internal corporate misandry just before they fired Johnny Depp for being a male victim — and destroyed two tent pole properties in the process.

Or were at Amazon again and warned there’d be financial troubles circa start of 2022 based on unprofessional conduct in FinTech?

…what happens when you’re repeatedly right about multi-billion dollar mistakes before they happen, but your employer just doesn’t care?

I don’t want to participate in what I see at WarnerMedia, Amazon,… Target, Disney, Bud Light, etc.

I want to be able to say I did the right thing for shareholders — not shut my mouth and took the hush money to defraud them.

> …what happens when you’re repeatedly right about multi-billion dollar mistakes before they happen, but your employer just doesn’t care? > > I don’t want to participate in what I see at WarnerMedia, Amazon,… Target, Disney, Bud Light, etc. > > I want to be able to say I did the right thing for shareholders — not shut my mouth and took the hush money to defraud them.

If you truly think this, the only moral course of action for you is to immediately leave the company. Otherwise you're "fraudelently" continuing to take shareholder money. If you think the execs of your company give a shit, or will ever give a shit, about what employee #3141991403 thinks about the direction of your company, you're delusional.

If you want my opinion, just shut up and take the money. It's not your problem if shareholders make bad decisions. And besides, if it wasn't you, it'd be someone else.

Hadn’t considered Pirates of the Caribbean as a loss in the Depp-Heard fight until just now, kinda sad.

Also like your use of tent-pole.

maybe I've read too many Taleb books, but can you put yourself in a position to bet against the stupidity? For example, take a short position on WarnerMedia/Amazon stock?

It would probably be safer to buy options instead of short-selling a stock, because with options your potential loss is limited and known.

You didn't reference Fat Tony or use a made-up word, you're still ok!

I think you’re right in the aggregate and the abstract.

But it’s also funny that two of the situations you mentioned (Johnny Depp “victim” and Bud Light) are fake stories based on conservative media astroturfing where any judge would be hard pressed to find that there was unreasonable behaviour on the corporate end.

And of course, being a white knight only works if you’re privileged enough to be able to jump ship or fight your social wars and still have something to fall back on. Not everyone here is a US citizen with US resident parents and US college education, earns 6 figures, or has had decades of working experience to accumulate savings and make a CV.

WarnerMedia fired Johnny Depp based on unsubstantiated allegations from a woman who herself has a history of domestic violence and Mr Depp was subsequently found to have been defamed and awarded damages for that lost work.

WarnerMedia fired Mr Depp for mere allegations, but retained Ms Heard despite police reports documenting her abusing her girlfriend at an airport.

The sexism shown by WarnerMedia executives is not in the interests of shareholders — and is part of not only why WarnerMedia had to be sold off from ATT for a massive loss, but has failed to recover post merger with Discovery.

- - - - -

Similarly, Bud Light decided to endorse a controversial spokesman, call their core audience bigots when they objected, denigrated them as “fratty” and “out of touch”… then seemed confused when the people they were openly rude to stopped buying their product.

- - - - -

What particular facts do you believe I’m wrong about?

I’m curious — and explaining that is much more interesting than Poisoning the Well fallacies, such as calling things you disagree with “astroturf”.

- - - - -

Finally, that’s excuses: you made up a stereotype about who I am, then decided you can safely ignore my point because that stereotype doesn’t apply to you.

> It's not that all organizations don't have disfunction, but as a younger person I was very fixated on everything I saw that was wrong and ignored either the problems I myself was introducing which were (and probably still are) numerous or the systems and programs that made the organization successful.

speaking from my own experience, when I look at my earlier career years I didn't appreciate how resilient organizations can be to disfunction, yes 100 things are broken, but for the most part everything will still be fine.

Not to mention how incredibly challenging it is to build an organization that is highly functioning. I've had the pleasure of working at a few different companies and I feel the most internally mature were the companies that had been around the longest. Sure, they had issues, but fundamentally they had insulated themselves from a large class of problems that the startups were constantly fighting through.

I have gone oppositional direction younger me was kinda yes-man and now I am more jaded and see systemic failures all around me.

There must now be projects like the one the author describes that are at least 5-10 years old now, I’d love to see a comparison of ones that delivered their promises and ones that keep delusionally lumbering on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com