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Comment by spott | Hacker News Reader

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

Any organization is eventually controlled by people more interested in the organization than its mission. Or something to that effect.

(Accidentally attached this to the wrong post, meant for the post above this)

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Technical people (or people with bad social skills) also love to inadequately and incorrectly try and turn the complexity of social organization into simple laws and rules. This kind of reduction doesn't really do people a service, and is also a bit arrogant and simple-minded. It would be much more interesting to name this as a tendency, and try to describe when and how it might occur, how the structure of the org might influence it, etc. Decontextualized takes projected onto everything like this are kind of misapplied and meaningless.

I know that it isn't always (heh) used as literally always and necessarily, but really there are no laws or always with human behavior. It's extremely dynamic and reactive. No organization will always do anything of such sort. I also like the word tendency.

I mean this is one case where the "law" is arguably true

The Nix drama from the start has been profoundly untethered from actual development or improvement of the project rather than minutia of committee organization and moderation of the Discourse forum

Whatever you think about the $5000 Anduril sponsorship for example, the "discussion" around that took up a ridiculous amount of mindshare relative to the actual dev work compared to almost any other open source project like Linux kernel for example

Aren't you guilty of the same thing by generalising that "technical people <love> simple laws and rules"? Also, calling people arrogant and simple-minded is a great example of behaviour that makes it difficult to hold a community together. We can have discussions without having to resort to insults.

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