alt Hacker NewsYeah but why does it always end up in such autocratic behavior? On paper, I'd naively argue, any team or organization, or even individual, who continues to actually deliver value for the company, shouldn't they get to have a say in where the ship could go to avoid sinking it?
Replies
An ugly truth is that corporations are built on a feudal structure (kings, lords, barons, earls, etc.) that is inherently autocratic and disguises autocratic action as efficient leadership. I like to think that cooperative business structures are less vulnerable to autocratic corruption, but they need to be on guard, watching out for people willing to exploit others to gain more power and try to keep them from finding their way onto paths to power.
They do. How many times do people on HN say "my manager won't let me write tests"? That's not true, 99% of the time they could just write tests and their manager wouldn't block it, but they ask for specific time blocked out to write tests and that's what gets denied. They're trying to push the responsibility for testing off to the manager.
The companies that win in the market are the companies that are modeled to win, not the ones modeled for justice and accountability.
To be less reductive, companies are owned by capitalists and they prefer autocracy for obvious reasons.
Hierarchy is the default because it is so simple. Designing alternative structures for responsibility raises lots of unexpected complexity. A good example of this is the Benefit Corporation idea which is gaining support and polish over time, but still involves considerable legal challenges. Being answerable to stakeholders and employee owned is very unlike answering to stockholders who own everything.
Normalization of deviance, soft power, and the fact that managing up and managing down are not the same skillset.
Delegating authority is a velocity/democracy tradeoff. Polling 100k people about where to get lunch doesn't work.
So over time, any time someone does something that might be seen as unjust, if it's within the error bars for "unusual but not a hard line", shifts the line more and more, especially if the people in question are good at controlling what the people above them hear, or calling in favors to shield themselves, until you wind up with sentences like "well of course they got fired, they were working on $THAT_PROJECT, and everyone knows $MANAGER hates $THAT_PROJECT".