| > [Taylorism] include analysis; synthesis; logic; rationality; empiricism; work ethic; efficiency and elimination of waste; standardization of best practices. To be fair, you have to accept that Taylorist doctrine states very emphatically that analysis, synthesis, logic and rationality are the exclusive domain of management. Boss's responsibility is to think very thoroughly about how work is to be done, and worker's responsibility is to do exactly as told. In Taylor's work it goes as far as to dictate how ofter and for how long workers are to take breaks (so the maximum amount of labor can be extracted from them without exhausting their muscles before the end of the shift). To complete your list, empiricism and work ethic are the tactics that are to be used to apply all that management's brain power; efficiency and elimination of waste are the end results; and standardization and best practices are the institutionalization of those end results so that the manager's enlightened intelligence can move on to "fine tune" the next process in the assembly line. I am not saying that there is no use of standards and best practices. If anything, in the software industry we need to be more strict, not less, about the best practices we already know and have known for several decades. But there is a big difference between that and the kind of micromanagement that this kind of tools elicit in practice. i.e. Professional athletes do need to drill until individual movements become second nature, and proper technique matters a lot if you are competing at the highest levels. But you do not see coaches trying to dictate what each player will do on every conceivable situation. Even in extremely structured sports, like football, the coach dictate a general strategy and changes tactics according to the dynamics of the game, but each individual player needs to apply a minimum of discretionary judgment to react to situations that arise mid-play. A coach that tried to move his players like puppets would be crushed by the competition. An army with such general and soldiers would be crushed in a more literal way. Why is it not the case with software companies? |