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Comment by actionfromafar | Hacker News Reader

Explaining the plan to the individual soldier also works better when the individual soldier is expected to care at all about the overall goal. (Such as believing in the mission of defending the home country.) When the soldier only has extrinsic motivation such as money, top-down command and control and treating soldiers solely as equipment to be spent makes more "sense", in a terrible way.

Maybe that applies to software orgs too, somehow.

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IT also only works if the soldier is well trained in the things he can do. I can teach you to shoot a machine gun in a couple hours - and half of that time will be figuring out how to shoot and clean it myself (I've used hunting rifles and have enough mechanical knowledge that I think I can figure out the rest - but someone who knows that gun can likely find something I would not figure out). That will be enough for "spray and pray" which is a large part of what a machine gun is used for.

However in a real war you need to figure out what direction to point the gun, and need to know when to fire and when to not. I don't know how the army handles "we are advancing now so don't shoot", or "we are crawling along the ground so make sure you shoot high": someone else needs to give anyone I train those orders. The army trains their machine gun operators better so they can figure a lot of that out without being told.

Good leadership means getting the individuals to care. That's no different in software

And yes, good leadership is very hard, and many managers aren't any good at it

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