Couldn't it be said that when organization acquire ranks, it is to solve coordination problems that arise with scale but that in this case, there isn't much that is solved by more organization ?
The incentives of an organization - or at least of a corporation - are to make money and to continue to exist and to enrich and empower the people who control it. But employees' incentives are usually pretty different. Nurses usually get into nursing because they, at least to some extent, want to help people. Engineers get into engineering because they, at least to some extent, want to build something really good. Teachers get into teaching because they want kids to learn. And so on.
If you're the principal of a school, and your goal is for a teacher to teach, you don't have a coordination problem. Most teachers want to do that. But if your goal is for teachers to maximize standardized test scores, or to minimize the number of frustrated parent calls, etc, you do have a coordination problem, because your goals are misaligned with your employees'.
If you're the CEO of a tech company, and your goal is for your engineers to build good software, you don't have a coordination problem. Your engineers want to do that. But if your goal is to maximize conversions, or to ship faster, or to raise money, etc., you do have a coordination problem.
If you run a hospital, and your goal is for your nurses to care for patients, you don't have a coordination problem. But if your goal is to maximize profits, then you do.
It's usually these kinds of coordination problems that managers are, effectively, in charge of enforcing. Their job is not to help individual employees achieve individual employees' collective goals, it's to make employees feel (sometimes truthfully) like their goals are aligned with the organizational goals, or to use the threat of loss of income or work to force them into line.
Please make a blog post or something and share it around.
"Institutions try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39491863
If you're focused on teaching, building or caring instead of test scores, conversions and profits, you're going to lose customers and opportunities.
Parents choose schools with better test scores, not schools with better teaching. Customers use products with better conversions; this is literally what the word "conversions" means.
If you focus on making your employees happy instead of making your customers happy, you'll quickly find that your employees have no more customers to serve. You will be outcompeted by other companies in the great rat race.
This is why most of the companies we have now are the way they are. It's not because all CEOs are evil, it's because the non-evil ones can't survive.
Only because other signals don't exist.
Parents know test scores don't correlate perfectly with learning, but what other metric do they have to judge by?
There are some schools with a stellar reputation for learning, and they get to charge an obscene premium. Amongst private schools, the ones with the best word of mouth reputation get to charge a lot more!
Personally, I think it's somewhere in between. Yes, some degree of "actually make things people want" is an essential component of a business...but I think the amount of "required evil" is usually overblown.
If markets were so ruthlessly competitive that no one could afford to be not-evil, no one would be making a profit. Every company would be barely surviving and profits would be minimal. The fact that profits exist - indeed, are much greater than they have been in the past - means that markets are NOT that ruthlessly competitive, at least not between actors with comparable access to capital resources.
Every dollar of profit a company makes is a dollar they could afford not to make and still survive. And given that the feasibility curve of profits <> level of evil is likely pretty convex, choosing not to make $1 likely pays out many dollars of not-being-evil externalities.
This is not true, I can confidently say, most of the time. Engineers generally want to build software they think is a good trade off between fulfilling the spec and not being too hard to build.
This does not generally translate to good software. It’s not a detriment of character or anything like that. They’re just lazy like most people are
Classically people got into software engineering because they liked writing code and they needed a way to pay the bills. Plenty of retired software engineers still code because it is part of who they are.
a no-true-scotsman fallacy.
A company should be able to build working software even without good engineers. Just like how TCP can deliver ordered packets over unreliable connections - you change the processes and systems to do it. Of course, you give up some things - such as speed and agility in that case.
For most people, a job is a job. It's not something they want to dedicate their life to - that's for artists and craftsman, and not many people are of that ilk in the modern day.
Most of the people I've had the pleasure of working with have a love for the craft.
Sadly I understand that with how messed to the economy is now days, making a good living in a US costal city doing anything else but software is rather unrealistic...
Compare that to the pandemic response example I gave: that is the kind of challenge where there are concrete problems at individual, city-wide, national and international scale to tackle, and they're all interconnected too. So plenty of those coordination problems you mentioned.