One of my hats is manager, and I find it amusingly honest. My job is to command, and they obey. Buying someone (chattel slavery) is worse than renting them (wage slavery), but it's a matter of degree.

Ok, I admittedly expend serious effort at inverting my authority... which is hilariously undermined by the devs I manage, because they're trained to be obedient specialist cogs and it's like pulling teeth to get them to act independently outside a narrow range. So there's pressures towards authoritarianism. But I don't manage only devs (and I'm supporting non-devs to become devs), so it's not all bad.

More interesting would have been a discussion of hierarchy: how were "management" tiers motivated, where did ordered delegation stop and palace coups begin, what are the modern equivalents of that top tier boundary?