> To me, one of the basic rules of social etiquette is never talk about religion or politics
Yeah I agree, I'm also surprised, never talk about religion/politics, health or money, those are private matters shared with people you can choose freely, and not with colleagues or other random people you can't choose, but need to get along with.
When it comes to money we should more freely talk about it. Trying to prevent discussions of salary and benefits is largely to keep us from shared understanding of the market rate, etc, which penalizes people less connected with the field.
I agree about the criticism against long working hours, but it's unfortunate I think to use the nuclear family as an example of another superior example here, to shove people further into another old fashioned failing arbitrary power structure comes a bit short as a vision of a better alternative.
What's arbitrary about a family? It's changed in size over the history of homo sapiens, but it has always existed and is pretty obviously a biological necessity and unavoidable natural law for us.
The arguments against it are entirely abstract and ungrounded.
You assign an enormous amount of special status to certain people who you happen to be related to by blood, and that's arbitrary. It works when it works, and it doesn't work when it doesn't.
What natural law says it's better to spend time with/live only with people who are related to by blood? The only necessity for reproduction is sexual intercourse. A family is susceptible to the same abuse and corruption as any other arbitrary power structure.
The arguments against it are the divorce rates, and they are not abstract or ungrounded.
What "special status"? It simply is how the world is, as we've seen over all of history.
Yes some marriages end in divorce and families disconnect in some cases, with various outcomes. The family still exists even if no-one participates in it. The guy is being overworked and unable to see his kids, I'm all for that guy seeing his kids. It can have huge knock on effects if it's ignored. You aren't forced to participate in family.
Family is built from natural impulses, biological connections and installs in the children an inheritance of values, schooling and relationships. There are reasons from first principles for families and the surrounding neighbourhood, city and country benefits from families. You can't hand-wave away the meaning of family as 'power' and 'arbitrary'.
> What "special status"? It simply is how the world is, as we've seen over all of history.
And we are trying to move into the future, not the past.
Are nuclear families really so important and successful that we need more of it? Is this really an undebatable absolute truth that should be forced on people? Let people decide on their own if they want to spend their new found free time on families or something else.
Edit: the "special status" is loyalty, and loyalty is bad if we are trying to live in a meritocracy.
Divorces are between people not related by blood (usually). The reason you provide resources to blood relatives (kids) is to give your genes the best chance to survive.
What if a person not related by blood will give your kids better chances?
What says that the parent will necessarily be the "best" person for their child through their whole life, and not someone else? That's arbitrary.
You see no issues with swearing life long loyalty to blood relations? That's just going to be the optimal solution in every case? That's making it a little bit too easy don't you think?
No, but I'm arguing that it's very unreliable, often fully backfires and becomes actually destructive, and that in our modern society there are other factors that are much more relevant to people's success in life, and blood relations I would say is fully arbitrary.
It's also just as natural for people to branch out and leave their families, as it is to stay close to their families.
And I think it's irrelevant to the discussion of shortening working hours, and a bad example because it's another oppressive construct.
It's like arguing for shortening working hours so that people can go to church more, and church is healthy. Really? That's highly debatable, and obviously another power structure which is also old fashioned and has seen decreasing success.
How about just shortening the working hours so that people can be more, free? And do what they want?
> so that people can go to church more, and church is healthy. Really? That's highly debatable, and obviously another power structure which is also old fashioned
This one is so debatable because the definition and theological implications of Church 'healthiness' depend upon many different variables and can differ subtly across all Churches.
Church isn't a 'power structure' though. It relies on voluntary participation. You can walk out of Church whenever you want.
Doing what you want tends to be quite narrow, hedonistic and unsatisfying in the end. It's easier to make the argument for free time from higher principles.
Haha ok so church has no power. And people can never be free, they must be institutionalised, and we should use shortening of working hours to just move them to a different institution that is even more old fashioned and increasingly failing, than then ones we are freeing them from.
Well I guess we can say that we have a fundamentally different view on what constitutes development and improvement of life and society.
I doubt we have a different view, as I haven't stated one on 'what constitutes development and improvement of life a society'.
Freedom is the ability to swim in any direction you want, so go ahead. Do whatever you want. The map of your possible options already exists and the institutions are just one or many worthwhile places to visit. When people do whatever they want it quite often ends up on a place on the map where there is a lot of hedonism and not much in the way of higher meaning or valuable aims.
As a dispassionate observer it is my inclination to suggest that people will take the argument for more free time off work in the favour of church and family as an easier argument to make, given it's connection to a higher meaning and relatable values. A boss will likely see anything connected to 'wants' as room for more work.
You might be correct in that you more accurately describe reality, but it still doesn't make any sense, and you have to do some serious gymnastics with both definitions and language, which just further illustrate what a big problem this is.
Yeah I agree, and the most ridiculous part is that they still have architects, team leads, product managers etc who now really do nothing other than riding the gullible software developer
We don't have architects :-) Most of bigger topics is decided by communicating between seniors in various projects. (it's fully transparent, anyone can see and contribute).
We have some PMs/POs in order to cover communications with customer - there's legal part to manage, market research, and there are difficult customers, which unusual reporting needs that have nothing to do with technology, so everyone is happy to leave it to them.
I don't understand this, this is the way every hierarchy work, and how every single job/management role is functioning. It's to solve the problem of communication overhead growing exponentially with larger groups of people. Why does this make you sad? And is it better to have a dysfunctional organisation where people float in and out of poorly defined roles and everyone tries to do everything? Does that really make you more happy? I don't get this emotional take on specialisation.
It is better to have a functional organisation where people float in and out of roles defined by the expectations of others and everyone is capable of judging basic business tradeoffs, yes.
That, in my experience, makes people happier. They get to focus on important problems, help people they know, and develop their well-roundedness as human beings.
I think you might be underestimating the amount of overhead that is added by a heavy bureaucratic hierarchy.
This reminds me of a very interesting comment on the engineering and management practices at Intel [1]: "I often called Intel an 'ant hill', because the engineers would swarm a project just like ants do a meal."
I've seen it happen at smaller scales, great engineers in flat hierarchies without direction might not be the best idea from a business perspective...
Only in a very hierarchical organisation are the lowest levels without direction -- because the higher levels maintain their position by keeping important information secret.
If the important information (market signals, experiment outcomes, financial data, etc.) is made available to everyone, and everyone receives a sliver of training in interpreting it, any group of engineers worth their salt can make responsible decisions in the right direction. (Often much better than a small set of executives would.)
I like the idea, and I've seen it work for teams focusing on a single project/product. What's unsolved for me is how to scale this.
Interpreting data takes time, figuring out a strategy that spans multiple projects and years takes time... not sure this is workable to do individually. I'm all for being transparent with goals, that would be a given for me in any kind of organization - hierarchical or not. But somebody needs to keep up with the ideas of the engineers, customer requests, business goals and changing markets to put everything into an actionable strategy. In bigger orgs this is an ongoing process and requires full-time dedication... It would be really hard (but very interesting) to come up with a process to 'crowd-source' those things from 100+ engineers, skipping the middle-management positions.
Yeah this annoys me to no end how tech people pretend that they have casually invented peace on earth, and act like it's the most obvious thing in the world. "Of course large groups of people simply just get along perfectly and efficiently without any coordination" Yeah right.
It's the people who are dysfunctional who thrive in these environments because they don't have to be accountable, so their issues just disappear, and people who actually function and take their job seriously will burn out and go insane in the chaos.
Large groups of people with a common goal can coordinate within themselves. They don't need to hear "do X, now do Y" from someone else.
And if they do, they can appoint that someone else on their own -- it's how the world's free countries operate, after all; and a country is bigger than a company.
The only reason people think this doesn't work for companies is that they haven't experienced the "common goal" part -- management bureaucracy discourages caring about the common goal, instead focusing on encouraging obeying direct orders.
(And then it goes on to redefine "obeying orders" as "coordination" to prevent anyone from seeing what's going on.)
And if they do, they can appoint that someone else on their own -- it's how the world's free countries operate, after all; and a country is bigger than a company.
That's still a "manager" someone to manager better coordination. The point here is that such a role is required to get work done.
Sure, there are weird things that happen when the manager stops being a bottom-up appointee and starts being a top-down ruler. Heck that is incredibly common. But that does not mean we should do away with central figures that handle coordination. You still need those central figures.
The book "Turn the Ship Around" by David Marquet is basically along these lines. He worked to turn a poorly-performing submarine in the US Navy to one of the best. The gist is that he enabled autonomy and shared vision to reduce the top-down heavy handedness that they were usually used to, allowing for more efficient decision making.
That's a gross generalization, and it is still very hard to conceptualize, but thought provoking.
I've worked under these circumstances before. It's not at all utopian, but I was definitely much happier. And yes, it is a bit cultish, but who cares? I'm an adult and I know it's just a job—If some cultish behaviour helps people who otherwise wouldn't care to know each other work together, then I'm all for it. It just requires transparency.
And of course, that isn't for everyone. I know people who hated working like that and left, and that's totally fine. Just don't be dismissive that there are other ways.
It's not that far off from my experience in a research organization.
We underestimate the commitment of others to helping the organization that pays for their food's success (even though we feel the commitment). Coordination is needed but if you trust and empower the ICs you can communicate a high level vision and then just look out for major problems and opportunities rather than micromanaging the people who are doing roughly the right thing.
It's a model that doesn't work everywhere but it can lead to increased creative output, happiness despite lower wages, less need for middle management, and other benefits to an organization.
Coordination without any kind of hierarchy has N!/2 complexity. That gets overwhelming way to soon.
Have an idea that requires everyone else to change something. N!/2 conversations to have. (Or one big meeting with the same sort of complexity).
Need to change your approach to match what others are doing, gotta make a 1-on-1 connection. If they need to change their approach, they need to coordinate with others, continue for a long time.
If you want any kind of efficiency
You need to have small-ish teams. I'd guess about 10 people. But lets say 50. You need to chunk up work so that teams can work in parallel. You need central oversight to coordinate the teams. This can be just a group meeting of team leaders, but the big picture should not be lost. And you need to make some decisions from this central picture.
Isn't hierarchy standing in for encapsulation here? Companies interact with one another in a coordinated way with neither a hierarchy, nor needing to know what every other company is doing
Is a hierarchy the right way to organise a company?
communication does not have to happen from manager down to lower manager and then manager to reports. Why can't one guy at the top just email everyone (and even that does not have to be top down, answers received from God on the mountaintop but can be part of an active conversation (cf Torvalds).
One way of looking at this is hierarchy works well for an organisation where the people are doing most of the actual work (ie an army fighting). It does not have to be the right solution where the actual work is code that will then do the actual work (ie Google's ad market place is run day to day by the code. when Google makes a chnage then they are to all intents releasing a new company that does things in new ways.
once upon a time you had the same people in the same roles and then turned to them and said you are going to (sell ads) in a different way. the distinction between an organisation and what it does was blurred. but with code there is a clear distinction.
I even go so far as to say that coders are the new managers - managers used to be needed for designing an organisation that would perform.
Considering the senior GIS focused dev at my work: to do what he does, but in the 70s he’d be a VP of a division of analysts and mapping techs. In 2022: he’s a programmer/maintainer on a project.
The co-op ramping up on the same program? Back in the day she would be a senior analyst on the management track under the VP. In 2022: a junior coder we can assign tickets to, with senior dev not as a boss/superior but as a guide.
Computer programs automate business processes that would require large orgs and rigid hierarchies 50 years ago.
>Is a hierarchy the right way to organise a company?
I think so.
I've twice worked as a software engineer for flat organizations (once as a subcontractor, once as a normal employee) and I really, really dislike it. Strong leadership is important.
There ends up being chaos, uncertainty, and a distinct lack of accountability.
I think the hard part would be equally split between: solving the right problem, ensuring the right flexibility, and making sure the customer actually will be happy.
The issue that I'm having with this, is that child care is still relatively unqualified work, so how can it ever be highly compensated?
Parents who are highly educated doctors, pilots etc argue that they should be able to stay at home for 1-2 years with almost full salary, which the tax payers should subsidise, and at the same time they also pay an uneducated 16 year old 10 bucks an hour to babysit when they go to the movies?
And you have 1 educated child care professional easily caring for 10 small children, and making a very modest salary.
Totally depends on the state of society and what the needs are, China had the opposite policy for over 30 years to achieve a declining birth rate. It's not true that more children = better. It's only an issue somehow for pyramid schemes of the welfare system.
Political will for transferring wealth from certain portions of the population to others can change quickly. Also, the pension amount likely will not keep up with real inflation, as is the case today.
Yeah, I'm constantly surprised that nobody every says this. With women entering the work force, now the family as a whole needs to work almost twice as much, as before when women were house wives. That's a pretty hefty price to pay for everyone, to save those women who were unlucky to have a cruel or unfair husband. I don't know if it's possible to say if it's "worth it" or not, but this independence sure does not come for free.
In particular, my wife like working and having her personal projects. I like to spends part of my time with my children. So we both work and we both take care of the children. We are lucky to have jobs that allow this.
Sure it's going to work out for some people, but I still think the obvious downside of increased working hours in total is very significant and almost never mentioned. If you raise the working day from 8 to 12 hours, just because you find some guy who likes it, maybe doesn't mean it should be accepted as a perfect idea with no downside.
How does women entering the work force (from your previous post) equal less freedom? Less freedom for whom? Certainly not women. Since you equate more communism with less freedom, I will assume you agree that money provides freedom, if women can only work as unpaid housewives, they have no freedom. It has nothing to do with their husband, cruel, unfair, or otherwise. This may be surprising, but not all women want kids or marriage, or may want them but also find great joy in working accomplishments - many just did not have those options in any safe stable way until recently. (historicity speaking)
That's not less freedom, it's more, for both women and men (not as much stigma or pressure for not being the 'provider' when they may not want to be) - it does lessen some power and control males have historicity had over society and others. And that can be threatening for those who enjoy limiting others freedoms and controlling them.
> How does women entering the work force (from your previous post) equal less freedom? Less freedom for whom? Certainly not women.
Less freedom for those who happen to like traditional gender roles, now they are forced to work more and adapt to more "modern" gender roles. Otherwise they will lose out massively because the single earner has so much lower salary now.
Less freedom because an almost doubled amount of total working hours for a family. Free time = freedom.
Less freedom for childless people because they have much lower salaries now because of the larger supply of workforce (which is somewhat compensated by subsidies to people with children). Now they compete against couples with double income on everything on the market.
A single childless person would previously have the same buying power as a single breadwinner, now they have half.
Less freedom because this creates a much higher pressure and financial incentives for people to have children and to have modern gender roles, and anything else is discouraged.
> if women can only work as unpaid housewives, they have no freedom.
Well, are you more free if you trade free time for working hours? You are literally only more free to slave more.
This freedom only manifests in the case when you want/need to leave your husband.
> Less freedom for those who happen to like traditional gender roles, now they are forced to work more and adapt to more "modern" gender roles. Otherwise they will lose out massively because the single earner has so much lower salary now
That's an equivocation. There is the freedom that comes from choice (what is not disallowed) and there is the freedom that comes from available choices. For example, homosexuals being able to marry is not the same kind of freedom as if I had a million dollars I'd be able to do what I want.
Those who prefer traditional gender roles can still have them, they just need to compete to afford it, as they did before, or to cut their cloth.
> It's just more communism and less freedom. Everyone has to make a big sacrifice for the unfortunate few. Corporal punishment to deal with the problem of some cruel husbands.
Not sure if you think you're being philosophical or you know this is nonsense, but it is.
The question is rather: Is it a good idea to get a second vaccine dose although you have already been both infected and vaccinated?