This is a very good summary. The universal formulation of this is Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy [0].
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
There is also what Stafford Beer writes about when discussing viable systems - the goal for most organisations, is not their stated goals, but survival and perpetuating the system. The stated goals are a byproduct of that, if and when achieved.i.e. in a lot of universities education is a byproduct, in a lot of hospitals, healthcare is a byproduct, hell in a lot of governments, governance and actually improving things is a byproduct, that will not happen unless there is an absolute need for it...
In a way it's like running a tricky multi-objective optimisation, and the AI will find a way to cheat the stated goal.
This whole trail through to the top comment is spot on.
It's also helped me work out a corollary in my mind that has puzzled me for a bit.
My sense, in the Marxist tradition, is that modern organisations are dependent on the extraction of value from highly capable technical resources and, especially outside the tech bubble, they largely resent this dependency.
Let's say developers are an example of a highly capable technical resource, though I am by no means limiting the scope.
This results in a series of mechanics that lead to developers being alienated:
- From the product of their development (ownership of IP and the resultant value of their code, distance from seeing the positive impacts of their work or talking to those it helps)
- From the act of developing itself (by its reduction to commercial use and control over how it is done, approval gates, arbitrary coding standards, ticket systems, scrum processes, project managers and product owners, Jira, timesheets etc.)
- From their fellow workers (stack ranking, power dynamics, labour competition, structural organisational tension)
- From their human nature and natural talent (by the reduction of their humanity and passion and capability to a mere "developer" or "engineer", use of stereotypes, reduction of humanity to output/LOC/story points delivered, corporate gaslighting at questioning this state of affairs etc.)
And most non-developer people that have worked in an average organisation and spent much time with developers have seen all of this at play, and heard how much developers hate it. Yet many still refuse, even in the face of self-interest (e.g. faster delivery of outcomes for a non-technical manager), to empathise and accept the reality of the experience enough to support better workplaces for developers. A tangible recent example is the insistence with all sorts of reasons on getting developers back into the office where they can be watched despite demonstrably lower productivity and engagement.
My sense of this is that what developers can bring to the modern world is the closest humanity has got to magic. And this dependency is resented. And this resentment leads to workplaces in which this resentment is externalised in the form of debasement (e.g. caricatures and other forms of ego compensation - "they're just the boffins, they don't have people skills!"), control ("the boffins can't really be trusted - better add some process and oversight, and given they don't have the people skills better make sure they aren't anywhere near management/clients!"), and dependency inversion ("sure the boffins can do their coding stuff, but they'd be nothing without us to help babysit and organise things, they don't get the way the world works, clearly it's they who actually need us!"). And this environment in turn leads developers to internalise this systemic resentment as a resentment of themselves, their capability, and their work, aka burnout.
But one question has been bubbling away for me for a while.
How do so many organisations arrive at a system in which it's almost a badge of honour to not be one of the doers? That those who can't do, should, as a moral claim, oversee, and manage, and lead? And we should keep adding more of those people until the doers can't possible do. Even when that produces lower tangible results.
Maybe at one point I internalised the Office Space / IT Crowd idea - the non-doers are "people people" who didn't spend decades at their PCs honing their craft but instead went to wild parties and focused on normal people stuff (the implication of course being that developers are lesser than normal people). Maybe the developers really can't be trusted. Maybe they do need to be managed and watched and distanced. Maybe the code monkey caricature (before being reclaimed by those it was used to demean) is right.
But now I wonder.
What if those people are empowered by the systems into positions of power over developers because in the first instance they affirm the original resentment: what if putting non-doers in charge safely perpetuates the idea that the developers belong at the bottom of the pyramid and affirms the extraction of their labour in support of the salaries and profits of those above relying on it? Or to put it another way, what if the code monkey caricature is effectively a justification of Marxist exploitation?
And what if the second order effect here is that some, let's call them the senior management class - leaders of the Second order of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy in the example above - are more conscious of these dynamics and consciously perpetuating them. What if they are knowingly hiring more non-doers to help keep this balance and control. What if it's not accidental, or people skills, that means non-doers are in charge? What if the very reason they're there in the first place is to be in charge even in positions outside of formal leadership (or at least indirectly support the power of someone else who brought them in for that reason) - after all they're not there to do.
So to close out a long post, a corollary to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy: in any bureaucratic organisation the ability to be able to contribute to the goals of the organisation will be an insurmountable barrier to having influence or control within it.
> How do so many organisations arrive at a system in which it's almost a badge of honour to not be one of the doers?
I believe this is a holdover from Western society's feudal roots*: the people who do things, especially who do things with their hands, are considered to be lesser beings than those who, by divine right, rule over them.
The ideas and values of feudalism are deeply embedded in our culture, and it's very hard to escape, for instance, the idea of the Good King, ruling benevolently because he is divinely granted better discernment to know what is good and right. (And also the Iron-Fisted Tyrant, which is a seductive fantasy to a different type of person.)
Some of these ideas come to us through the medium of things like just world theory and other Protestant notions, but at their core, they're still basically the same thing: the idea that the people who rule do so because they are Better People, and the people they rule (the ones who have to work for them) are in the position they're in because they are Lesser People.
Thus, rising to management becomes a proof that you, too, were a Better Person all along.
* Not saying other societies don't have feudal roots, just that I'm familiar with Western society
> What if they are knowingly hiring more non-doers to help keep this balance and control. What if it's not accidental, or people skills, that means non-doers are in charge?
You bet this is the case. Every manager is, consciously or not, empire building. Hiring more underlings so they become more important. This not necessarily mean that they are evil schemers - on average, people are pretty good at convincing themselves that what they do is good and necessary.
Note that Big Corps have much more in common with communism than with capitalism. The way people think about capitalism, where everything is hyper efficient, is incompatible with the huge amount of waste that goes on in big organisations (this is a gross simplification, but you get the point). Communism by its nature means a large centralized bureaucracy, with ironically even worse denial of personal agency and thus more alienation.
Valve tried the whole "let's get rid of managers" and "taking back power in dev's hands' thing. It always devolve into doers-turned-barons who screw everyone and everything with power struggles and political intrigues. And I say this as someone who finds most managers useless and incompetent.
This is the main problem with Marxist theory. It is a well contrived system of beliefs mixing strong emotions, down to earth realism and an overcomplicated and oververbose theorical development that justifies the existence of its own expertise. All of this form a strong opium for most intellectuals.
In the end it loses touch with reality and its scientific pretense very quickly as the predictions don't meaningfully materialize and it fails to deliver on its promises.
History does not follow a direction. The workers never formed a group united just by virtue of being workers. Humans are not malleable not do they have a good natural state. Reforms have always outperformed radical and violent revolutions. Marxist revolutions were never lead, instigated and started by the workers. It miserably fails at deciding on who actuallt gets the power ans make decisions.
A lot of people blame "capitalism" for societal problems but there are no other reasons given except that those are unique to and caused directly by capitalism; capitalism being whatever exists just by virtue of being outside a marxist/socialist society. This is made evident by the fact that marxist revolutionaries are always confronted by the same problems that those who they overthrown had; and so they become labeled as state-capitalists to excuse their faillings.
I think that some of this is true, but, in the Marxist tradition, it strives to define classes of people to hate, and ignores the key aspects of capital, risk and relationship in things succeeding.
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
[0] https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html