Sounds like a bank, a government agency, or any business over a certain size.
I tell people you only call it politics when you are losing. More accurately, it's a layer of literal stupidity above the competent to shield the money side of the company from the leverage that operations people would have if they had any information about how the money side worked.
Instead of a hierarchy, rethink a company as a hub and spoke model with concentric rings. The main differences are the implication in a hierarchy that there is "gravity," keeping people down and that they need energy and leverage to climb "up," which further implies there is a place to "fall," and that there is only one way "up," instead of many possible paths to the centre from all directions. There is no gravity, only gates and barriers, and even these are just information. Politics is how a middle manager runs interference and creates distractions to make sure you can't see over, around, or through them, and that the people behind them closer to the money can't see you. Tech is usually outside the main perimeter, mediated by contracting companies or middle managers whose job is to compartmentalize the value people create, and be sure it is replaceable.
Viewed this way, of course this demented political farce is how Apple works, because it's how everything seems to work when you have internalized the precise and specific mental model someone uses to take advantage of you.
Sorry if you can't unsee it now, but hopefully it will be funny and we can get good, competent people who value tangible skills into positions of power.
> More accurately, it's a layer of literal stupidity above the competent to shield the money side of the company from the leverage that operations people would have if they had any information about how the money side worked.
This is a brilliant description of it. The money people aren't stupid, despite what the workers think. They just have more information and different motivations which, in most larger organisations, they actively avoid explaining to the operations people.
Edit: Changed 'an incredible description' to 'a brilliant description' because it is entirely credible.
Could you explain this more? Who are the operations people? (finance? HR?) Who is the money side? (product? sales?) How exactly would "operations people" have leverage if they knew how the "money side" worked? Like, what specifically would they do? Also leverage over whom? And ultimately, couldn't whoever all these groups eventually report to (the CEO but possibly lower) resolve all this by firing some people?
I don't have a good model of how these things work. I encountered it first hand, but couldn't develop a good model after a long time of thinking about it. Tons of things happened that I didn't understand at all, and I couldn't understand why higher-level people wouldn't just resolve it.
- The 'operations people' / 'workers' ('the competent' in the post I was replying to) are the actual work-doers who create the company's product or provide the company's services.
- The 'money people' are the people in financial and managerial positions who deal with money coming into and out of the company, and who make the financial decisions.
Usually the latter, who know how much people are paid and how much the company makes, take considerable pains to withhold this information from the former, who have specialist skills but are often not business savvy. This is because the company's profit comes from creating as large a gap as possible between the income that the company makes and the wages and other expenses that they pay.
In a small company this information is directly withheld from the staff, but they tend to have some idea. This is part of why small companies tend to either pay better than, or have smaller margins than, large companies.
In a large company, part of the purpose of middle management is to isolate the money people from the operations people so that the operations people don't find out how much they're actually worth to the company. If you find out that you're getting paid $100 to make $10,000 for the company, you're going to be pissed, and either demand a pay raise or leave.
Edit: To be clear, I don't mean to say that middle management are stupid, by any means. Part of their role is, however, ignorance (wilful or imposed, feigned or genuine) of the company's financials.
This model doesn't quite make sense to me. The layer of idiocy is extremely expensive-- not only do you have to pay their salaries and associated operations costs, but they also introduce enormous inefficiencies. Everything moves slower. It's hard to find important information because it's lost in a sea of bullshit. People make locally optimal decisions that are suboptimal for the company.
The costs of all this are enormous. Is maintaining this army really cheaper than just handing the reigns to ops people and paying them more in proportion to their increased leverage?
It's not a layer of idiocy - that's a common misconception (which I didn't help with, tbf) and unfair to good middle management. What it is is a layer of isolation. And they do also serve another real organisational need, to help coordinate the workforce. Without such a structure, organisation cost is O(N^2). When your business model is paying smart people $X to build a thing, then selling the thing for 10 * $X, you can't let the smart people know that the thing is sold for that much or they'll start demanding more money (or quit and start their own competing company selling a better product for 4 * $X.)
Yes, because it also makes the ops people easily replaceable. On a small scale you can have a tyrant sys admin controlling a company, but on a company scale, nothing is more terrifying than someone other than the CEO being in control
Money side is like a mini-VC like ecosystem inside a large corp; people on the money side spend the money in whatever ways they need to maintain their little fiefdoms. Additionally, and with their new found power, they'll layer in a bunch of morons to prevent operations people - who's sole job is to eliminate inefficiencies everywhere - from understanding that the money side is basically a giant game.
If the operations people ever fully understood how badly the money people are fucking things up, they'd have leverage to use against the players on the money side and it'd be game over.
It's a way to establish power and extract value out of what would otherwise be a more efficient company or system, since those efficiencies don't benefit you directly. The company might do better but your incentives align in a way to extract value from it. If the customer gets burned, or poor quality products get launched, the feedback mechanism is broken. Consolidating power and crushing the competition is more tangible than anything the business actually does.
Which is why stock compensation was expected to help this, at least in theory.
> It's a way to establish power and extract value out of what would otherwise be a more efficient company or system, since those efficiencies don't benefit you directly. The company might do better but your incentives align in a way to extract value from it
This is a fancy way of saying corruption. Twisting the system to be used for your own ends, be they strategic, or just straight-up cash-in-my-pocket, is corruption.
Operations workers can see the daily inefficiencies and profit from them, or inject themselves into processes and decisions in ways that will benefit them. Adding a layer of moron/process/politics slows or halts this bad behavior, at the cost of increased overhead and inefficiency.
I take that to mean, people in ops using their ability to bring the company to a grinding halt by turning off all the infrastructure with the aim of extracting things like better pay.
The most powerful force for reform is talented and skilled people finding ways to make money that isn't subject to the games played in large bureaucracies. As they do other things, those other things outcompete the big bureuacracies and those bureaucracies either adapt (thus reforming) or wither away (thus getting replaced by something better).
The problem with this is that government is easily swayed by megacorp money. That money actually creates additional regulation, first by spooking people into thinking the megacorps need to be reined in then by using their influence to ensure the congresscritters hungering for megacorp attention create regulations that are more damaging to industry upstarts than to megacorps that currently dominate their industries. As a result, all these business regulations end up strengthening the hold of industry dominators over their industries, and they just find ways to keep their games going, serving goals wildly different from what most people imagine they really serve. As a result of those regulations being so crushingly bad for small industry upstarts and basically just a drop in the bucket for megacorps, the businesses that could have unseated the current kings -- with an influx of great talent leaving the megacorps -- end up being ground up by regulatory costs until they give up and get bought out by the megacorps, then destroyed or absorbed into efforts opposed to the companies' original high ideals.
Once in a while, someone manages to break through the competition glass ceiling, but usually it's at the cost of selling the soul of the company's original vision and becoming exactly what they originally meant to make obsolete.
I'm not good at seeing interpersonal relations, so it took me a couple years of working at a Fortune 50 to figure this out, and it's absolutely true. When I finally put it together, my political/economic beliefs shifted considerably. These organizations aren't there to create value, but to concentrate it, even at the expense of everyone else.
I think a summary of it is that some things are broken by design in a large org.
If you've worked in a huge org like Apple or the government, you've seen incredible inefficiencies. How can all these smart and often well-paid people be doing something so wrong (i.e. wasting time with political battles, etc.)?
But that's only true if you look at the "medium view" of the organization. If you look at the large view, how the money actually flows, then it might be beneficial for one part like IS&T to be kind of broken, as long as the rest of the company works.
I have seen this dynamic at other companies. Internal tools can sometimes hold too much leverage over the organization. They can almost "blackmail" people into getting their way because they have a literal monopoly over what they do. It might be better to let multiple teams fight battles amongst themselves, which seems inefficient if you're working as a regular joe, but could be efficient from the CEO's perspective.
----
Edit: A related idea is the principal-agent problem:
e.g. if you've worked at any large org, you know that not everyone acts in the company's interest (nor should they strictly speaking). A trivial example of this is putting extravagant meals and vacations on the company's card. (Although the nontrivial instances of this go all the way up to fraud/embezzlement.)
A less trivial example is making up fake engineering work that sounds good when review time comes, but doesn't actually advance the company's business.
So some things that seems mystifying on the ground level are pretty much a defense against this inherent conflict of interest.
In an adjacent domain, a lot of HR is a defense against employees acting in their own interest. (I see a lot of veterans on here saying: "remember HR doesn't exist for you", which is presumably a hard won experience.)
> But that's only true if you look at the "medium view" of the organization. If you look at the large view, how the money actually flows, then it might be beneficial for one part like IS&T to be kind of broken, as long as the rest of the company works.
To a degree that's true. However I'm reminded of the CEO of Sears, who embraced that concept entirely. He expected each team essentially to battle for funding -- with (unsurprising) result that it was a free-for-all and teams spent more time wrangling and fighting than actually getting stuff done.
A little competition motives; bellum omnium contra omnes is just a waste of resources.
Well, the mistake there is to not try and convince your teams they're doing what they do because it's the 'right thing' or that they're the "best" and he's proud of them, or whatever whatever non-monetary incentive one can think of that often is surprisingly effective.
It's as if there's three classes of people involved in economic production, workers, managers, and owners. hmm i'll have to think about that some more. It really hits the marks.
I tell people you only call it politics when you are losing. More accurately, it's a layer of literal stupidity above the competent to shield the money side of the company from the leverage that operations people would have if they had any information about how the money side worked.
Instead of a hierarchy, rethink a company as a hub and spoke model with concentric rings. The main differences are the implication in a hierarchy that there is "gravity," keeping people down and that they need energy and leverage to climb "up," which further implies there is a place to "fall," and that there is only one way "up," instead of many possible paths to the centre from all directions. There is no gravity, only gates and barriers, and even these are just information. Politics is how a middle manager runs interference and creates distractions to make sure you can't see over, around, or through them, and that the people behind them closer to the money can't see you. Tech is usually outside the main perimeter, mediated by contracting companies or middle managers whose job is to compartmentalize the value people create, and be sure it is replaceable.
Viewed this way, of course this demented political farce is how Apple works, because it's how everything seems to work when you have internalized the precise and specific mental model someone uses to take advantage of you.
Sorry if you can't unsee it now, but hopefully it will be funny and we can get good, competent people who value tangible skills into positions of power.