
How to identify an immoral maze - apsec112
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/01/12/how-to-identify-an-immoral-maze/
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chadash
Number of levels in the hierarchy seems like a bad way to determine this. I've
worked in a company with 500 employees (and three levels) and _lots_ of
bureaucracy and a company with 100,000+ employees (~6-8 levels depending on
your division) with relatively little bureaucracy (yes, on occasion, I ran in
to bad cases of it, but it didn't effect my day-to-day work).

It's simply not possible to have 100,000+ employees and less than 6 levels,
unless you have managers with tons of employees. But it _is_ possible to be in
a division of a large company where your group has relative autonomy and are
empowered to do what they need to do. In my case, there were about 20 of us
inside of a larger 500 person group. 95% of decisions were made within the 20
person group (obviously this is an approximation). Another 4% were made at the
500 person group management level. 1% were made by company-wide executives. In
other words, my boss was accountable for most of what we did. On occasion,
he's need to go to his boss for something. And very rarely, his boss would
need to escalate to higher ups (where there were another 3 or 4 levels to the
CEO). This company was very well run, but there are much smaller companies
with fewer levels in the hierarchy and lots more bureaucracy.

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Misdicorl
> It's simply not possible to have 100,000+ employees and less than 6 levels,
> unless you have managers with tons of employees

Math does not check out. 5 levels for 100k employees results in 10 reports per
manager (assuming a top level with 10 people rather than 1, which is
approximately correct given CEO/CTO/CIO/etc/etc/etc). Maybe 10 qualifies as
'tons' for you? Going down to 4 levels gives 18 reports per manager, which
feels a little closer to 'tons'.

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chadash
I think we agree in principle, just different understanding of how to count
levels. Based on the article, a company with a boss and one employee is two
levels ("With only two levels, a boss and those who report to the boss...").
So for 100,000 people, with average 10 employees per manager:

1 Big Boss (Level 1)

10 (Level 2)

100 (Level 3)

1000 (Level 4)

10000 (Level 5)

100000 (Level 6)

That's six levels. In practice, some people will have more than 10 and some
less, but unless the people under you are doing menial work, I think 10 is
probably middle of the road.

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Aperocky
The math stop checking out at level 4.

You have level 5 managers managing 10 each, and you have level 4 managers
managing 10 teams each? That stops checking out. The higher you go the more
disciplined you have to be about grouping relating teams under the same
umbrella for efficient execution.

In fact, the levels don't matter as much as the autonomy at each level. The
more autonomy, provided that the right people are hired and are focused on the
goal, makes it better and less managerial burden going up the chain.

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LanceH
I worked briefly for a very large company where the bulk of the effort was
around supply chain management. The actual production of the product was
simple and relatively solved long ago -- it was so much more about branding
and distribution. Early on I started to wonder if any of the people I was
working with had ever stepped foot in one of the warehouses we were managing
software for; or met a user of that same software.

The whole place was rife with consultants and contractors who had been working
there for years upon years. I was there as a consultant (glorified contractor)
and it quickly became apparent that I was there to be an evil consultant. The
goal wasn't to produce the system they needed, it was to produce billable
hours and ingratiate ourselves to the host such that we could land another
project. We were using whole off-shore teams to do work which might have been
done by one or two people locally. It was all about getting the margins on the
highest headcount possible. For all of this, I was a BA, one layer off the
"line" of people actually producing. The people above me only talked to other
people who were neither buying the product nor producing it, exactly as the
article describes. They were less interested in the product getting made than
their ability to show that things were going well.

I found (actual) work elsewhere.

Half joking aside: this also reminds me of the java frameworks/architectures
that got me to hate the language so much.

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chasd00
hah reminds me of the demotivator "Consulting, if you're not a part of the
solution there's money to be made prolonging the problem"

I'm in consulting and there is a lot of that. Especially in big companies on
big projects where entire teams can hide and just bill hours and a deliverable
never materializes. The consultants have no emotional investment in the client
and so as long as the invoices are paid no one is going to care.

Now, withhold payment until milestones are met or the deliverable is in
production and everyone gets much more interested in productivity.

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downerending
Once worked at a large corp that called these "Arthurs" (after Arthur
Anderson). The executives would order them up in bulk, as in "Project X needs
80 for the next six months".

Once, to meet deadline (and thus $$$) on integrating two alarming systems,
they had an Arthur watch for alarms 24x7 on system one and manually type each
one into system two. You won't learn that sort of thing at university.

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cbanek
I remember looking at this when I joined MSFT. I think I was 7 management
links away from billg. And yes, many of the middle managers fought with each
other constantly, not knowing what was actually happening on the coding level.

We had these huge reorgs where all the middle managers would get shuffled, but
almost all the ICs and their leads would be doing the same thing as always,
maybe once every other year.

Although this article leaves out that even in a flat organization, if you have
people that have it out for you, or are trying to manipulate you, they are
essentially building an immoral maze as well (and one that by design you will
be found lacking).

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blowski
You’re absolutely right - I’d much rather work in a formal hierarchy than an
informal one.

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bartread
For those of you wondering why informal hierarchies can often be worse than
formal hierarchies I offer an old but still very relevant essay by Jo Freeman,
"The Tyranny of Structurelessness":
[https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm](https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm)

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nathan_compton
What is disturbing to me about the idea of having skin in the game is that I
really struggle to imagine a work situation in which I would even _want_ to
have skin in the game. Skin in the game means responsibility at some personal
level, and the absence of that personal responsibility is precisely the nice
thing (perhaps the only nice thing) about wage labor.

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AtlasBarfed
Well, if you save the company a million dollars, do you get even .01% of that?

Nope.

Large companies are like communism, even when there are opportunities for
internal competition, it is stamped out. And for all the talk of "market pay"
and "executive rentention bonuses", there is little in the way of
incentivizing employees with revenue sharing tied to what they produce.

Which underlines the entrenched oligarchy of the USA. Like a meta-conway's
law, our government is just a reflection of large corporations in the age of
cartel/monopoly/consolidation in virtually all sectors.

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monadgonad
Ironically, under communism the workers would directly get get a share of the
money they make/save for the company.

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jonathlee
I have never heard of that happening in _any_ real-world version of communism.
Maybe you are thinking of an employee-owned company?

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npo9
I’m unsure if how many layers deep alone is a good indicator of if it’s an
immoral maze.

I once worked with a company that had 50 employees and the hierarchy was five
people deep. I once worked in a company with 10,000 employees and the
hierarchy was six deep.

The larger company with one more layer was much better.

~~~
dvirsky
Yes, the number of levels needs to be normalized by the size of the org
(although probably some log of the size, it should not grow linearly,
following the nature of an org tree). If one manager has around 5 direct
reports on average, you need seven levels to span 80K employees. If a single
manager has 10 direct reports you still need five levels to reach 100K (though
I doubt there is a single 100K+ employee company that is only five levels
deep)

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Jamwinner
I see a lot of comments saying they would be afraid of skin in the game. I ask
those who feel that way; why on earth would you work every day toward
something you don't see yourself in, breathe and beleive in? That sounds
utterly soul-crushing to fear the one thing that gives work meaning.

~~~
progman32
Some don't have a choice. Some find meaning elsewhere, for example some see a
job as simply a means to provide for their family. If a job is just a job,
switching jobs for greener pastures becomes easier. Perhaps putting their
family's interests before their own also becomes easier (how many stories of
founders having family issues have you heard?). It's a question of priorities.

Being personally invested in a company has risks and advantages. I've seen
people tolerate a lot of nastiness from their employer because the victim
"believes in the mission".

I for one have to watch my tendency to get attached to "missions," lest I lose
too much self-determination capacity.

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AtlasBarfed
Are there large revenue rich organizations that are NOT immoral mazes?

It's like democracy being the worst form of government, except all the others.

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dragonwriter
> Are there large revenue rich organizations that are NOT immoral mazes?

Because both depth of organization _and_ (the author doesn't point to this,
but it's my experience of the effect the author describes) span of control
contribute to the effect, there aren't large organizations beyond a certain
size (independent of revenue) that aren't immoral mazes.

You can balance depth and span to mitigate the problem, but limiting
organization size is the only way to actually avoid it.

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alexashka
There are a lot of words here.

Isn't it simply a matter of humans being simpletons and not meant to take into
account complex phenomena such as the good for millions if not billions of
people?

Most everyone I know only thought about themselves and a few thought
philosophically about others but lacked experience, until they had kids. With
kids, they started thinking about their kids' success so they started to care
the minimum amount to get their kids into good neighbourhoods, schools, etc.

That's the extent of most people I know, most of whom are University graduates
- I can only imagine people without higher education thinking even less or
parroting what they heard on tv.

Given that people are this simple, 'immortal mazes' are just a natural
consequence of our make-up. If we want to live in big cities and work in
offices with hundreds of people, many of whom keep changing jobs, we're not
going to achieve communities and the good things that come with them.

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bryanrasmussen
The suggestion of not having anything to do with these mazes is in effect a
suggestion not to have anything to do with any extremely successful company as
far as I can figure out - so, at what monetary point will a company become a
maze?

~~~
AnimalMuppet
It's not at a monetary point. It's usually when the company has succeeded to
the point that it's not in danger of failing, even if inefficiency sets in.
Once it reaches that point, then it's a matter of how long it takes the
culture to rot. (Most cultures rot eventually.)

I wonder if "immoral maze" explains our politics as well, and if it has the
same cause. The US hasn't been in danger of failing, even if the government
became insanely inefficient.

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ironman1478
Unless skin in the game counts as accountability, then that's definitely
missing from the list. My previous employer had zero accountability for the
people above the software engineers who implemented things and unfortunately
these people made all the decisions. You'd have architects and PMs who had all
these terrible ideas, tell people to implement these terrible ideas and then
blame the engineers when things didn't work. So dumb.

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pmiller2
Based on the article, it looks like the fundamental problem is lack of "skin
in the game," and the author notes it as a defense against becoming an immoral
maze. But, how can one identify "skin in the game," particularly 2+ levels of
the hierarchy above oneself?

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SpicyLemonZest
A core implication of the article's thesis is that it's very hard in general.
Otherwise, the owners of any organization would just issue an order saying
"everyone's gotta have skin in the game". (In fact they do try to issue that
order; a typical corporate middle manager will get quite a bit of their
compensation from performance-based programs and company stock they're
culturally discouraged from selling.)

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pmiller2
That doesn’t quite get at what I’m saying. I’m claiming that “skin in the
game” is not really something an individual employee can identify organization
wide. And, if it’s not possible to determine whether your boss’s boss has
“skin in the game,” it’s a useless construct for determining whether a given
organization is an immoral maze, regardless of its causal role.

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Rury
These seem contradictory to me:

>For sufficiently large organizations, as described in Moral Mazes, skin in
the game is not so much spread thin as deliberately destroyed.

>Mazes systematically erase all slack

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AstralStorm
Holding someone to their promises strictly is not the same thing as having
stakes. It's used as an equivalent to area denial weapon - time spent being
listed with work is time you do not get to challenge the immediate superiors
or peers. The work does not have to be related to company goals.

Since the work gets pushed down, ultimately rank and file workers get screwed
the most.

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mnemonicsloth
It's true that hierarchy is bad, but I don't see why it was necessary to spend
1500 words in saying so.

He also misses something big: your relationship with your boss is more
important than the shape of your organization. A good boss can shield you from
official weirdness, even in an organization 20 layers deep. A bad boss can
turn any working arrangement toxic very quickly, even in a company completely
devoid of hierarchy.

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eddywebs
I was in an immoral maze once, had I read this article before I might have
still been there (for good reasons).

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jrochkind1
I feel so seen.

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commandlinefan
> A world without slack is not a place one wants to be.

My first thought was, “no, I’d love to be able to delete the damned thing” and
then I realized he wasn’t talking about the chat app…

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dfraser992
I wonder if the writers of HBO's Succession have read this series of web page?
I have only glanced at a few pages TBH, but this immediately came to mind.

