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Yeah 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 actu

Yeah 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?

m0llusk 24d ago
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.
rincebrain 24d ago
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".
inigyou 24d ago
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.
rickydroll 24d ago
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.
dolkycape 24d ago
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.
M95D 23d ago
1) Most businesses in capitalism are owned by investors, not by workers. They are not democracies, not even in communism where they are supposedly owned by everyone. 2) Cooperatives are what you are looking for. Why aren't there more of them? No founder ever wants to share the initial investment. Is it a universal human weakness? I don't know. Why aren't the very few that exist growing to be more successful than a small local niche thing? Probably because democracies work best for small groups and progresively degrade as the number of people increase. 3) It works as indended. The people that are (temporarily) interested in the success of the organization, and with the power to change it if it looks like it's failing, are not interested in long-term success. As long as company's stock can be sold, only short term profits matter. Owners of family businesses are more likely to listen to low level employees, but they're still autoritarian.

m0llusk 24d ago

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.

rincebrain 24d ago

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".

inigyou 24d ago

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.

rickydroll 24d ago

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.

dolkycape 24d ago

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.

M95D 23d ago

1) Most businesses in capitalism are owned by investors, not by workers. They are not democracies, not even in communism where they are supposedly owned by everyone. 2) Cooperatives are what you are looking for. Why aren't there more of them? No founder ever wants to share the initial investment. Is it a universal human weakness? I don't know. Why aren't the very few that exist growing to be more successful than a small local niche thing? Probably because democracies work best for small groups and progresively degrade as the number of people increase. 3) It works as indended. The people that are (temporarily) interested in the success of the organization, and with the power to change it if it looks like it's failing, are not interested in long-term success. As long as company's stock can be sold, only short term profits matter. Owners of family businesses are more likely to listen to low level employees, but they're still autoritarian.