For what it’s worth, I think a naïve reading of this post would imply that moral mazes are more common than my experience indicates.
I’ve been in middle management at a few places, and in general people just do reasonable things because they are reasonable people, and they aren’t ruthlessly optimizing enough to be super political even if that’s the theoretical equilibrium of the game they are playing.[1]
This obviously doesn’t mean that they are ruthlessly optimizing for the company’s true goals though. They are just kind of casually doing things they think are good for the business, because playing politics is too much work.
I spent about a decade at a company that grew from 3,000 to 10,000 people; I would guess the layers of management were roughly the logarithm in base 7 of the number of people. Manager selection was honestly kind of a disorganized process, but it was basically: impress your direct manager enough that they suggest you for management, then impress your division manager enough that they sign off on this suggestion.
I’m currently somewhere much smaller, I report to the top layer and have two layers below me. Process is roughly the same.
I realized that I should have said that I found your spotify example the most compelling: the problems I see/saw are less “manager screws over the business to personally advance” but rather “helping the business would require manager to take a personal hit, and they didn’t want to do that.”
Nod. I maybe want to distinguish between “the organization goodharts itself as it grows, via a recursive hiring/promoting/enculturation mechanism that is strong that the size/bureaucracy would naively predict”, vs “the organization is increasingly run by sociopaths” (via that same mechanism). It sounds like you’re saying your experience didn’t really match either hypothesis, but checking in about the distinction.
Yeah that’s correct on both counts (that does seem like an important distinction, and neither really match my experience, though the former is more similar).
For what it’s worth, I think a naïve reading of this post would imply that moral mazes are more common than my experience indicates.
I’ve been in middle management at a few places, and in general people just do reasonable things because they are reasonable people, and they aren’t ruthlessly optimizing enough to be super political even if that’s the theoretical equilibrium of the game they are playing.[1]
This obviously doesn’t mean that they are ruthlessly optimizing for the company’s true goals though. They are just kind of casually doing things they think are good for the business, because playing politics is too much work.
Curious for more details on the size of the companies, how many layers of management there were and what the managers’ selection process was.
I spent about a decade at a company that grew from 3,000 to 10,000 people; I would guess the layers of management were roughly the logarithm in base 7 of the number of people. Manager selection was honestly kind of a disorganized process, but it was basically: impress your direct manager enough that they suggest you for management, then impress your division manager enough that they sign off on this suggestion.
I’m currently somewhere much smaller, I report to the top layer and have two layers below me. Process is roughly the same.
I realized that I should have said that I found your spotify example the most compelling: the problems I see/saw are less “manager screws over the business to personally advance” but rather “helping the business would require manager to take a personal hit, and they didn’t want to do that.”
Nod. I maybe want to distinguish between “the organization goodharts itself as it grows, via a recursive hiring/promoting/enculturation mechanism that is strong that the size/bureaucracy would naively predict”, vs “the organization is increasingly run by sociopaths” (via that same mechanism). It sounds like you’re saying your experience didn’t really match either hypothesis, but checking in about the distinction.
Yeah that’s correct on both counts (that does seem like an important distinction, and neither really match my experience, though the former is more similar).