[trojanalert]

To be read in conjunction with the Babbler hypothesis - The amount of time some people spend talking gets them into leadership positions. It doesn't matter what they say, just how much they rant on. I read that, and realised how insanely true it is

[cen4]

Well these observations have nothing with to do with the main conundrum -

How do you keep a group of chimps who all have different interests, personalities, needs, beliefs, values, upbringings, culture, religion, language, history etc etc in sync?

And these days groups grow quite large quite fast.

Historically, if you take rewards, bribery, force, domination and manipulation out of the story, the babblers/non threatening people can bridge differences as groups grow larger and larger in size.

No solution is perfect, cause its quite an unnatural thing for groups to form around anything. Given all the differences.

Just try to work with your entire extended family on a project, and watch what kind of strange rituals, stories and behaviors keep the group from breaking apart.

[mgblogg]

> if you take rewards, bribery, force, domination and manipulation ...

That is a big "if". It works on the family level, but in the real world babbling is coupled with dominance, coercion, blackmail, exploitation etc.

It is easy to see in any average company that no one believes the babbler but is forced to listen to them and applaud.

[sulandor]

though the shared disdain for the babbler creates a "common enemy" which is probably better than being forced to work directly

[blitzar]

> How do you keep a group of chimps ... in sync?

Modern management theory says you put the one that throws the most shit and chimps the loudest in charge; give them 90% of the banannas and tell all the others they should be more like that one if they want nice things.

[Lammy]

> How do you keep a group of chimps who all have different interests, personalities, needs, beliefs, values, upbringings, culture, religion, language, history etc etc in sync?

Humans aren't chimps. Our closest animal relative is the Bonobo, and the corporate world would be a much more interesting place if we solved our conflicts the way they do: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bonobo-sex-and-so...

[627467]

I feel like we forgot (or deprioritized - or maybe never genuinely prioritized) how to NOT have to sync on everything all the time.

not everyone needs to be in a group.

not everyone in a group needs to be in sync with interests AND personalities AND needs AND beliefs AND...

but I see the paradox here: we need to believe the above is true to live happier and more meaningfully

[stavros]

By "groups" we mean "working with people". How are you going to do anything without working with people?

[627467]

no one needs to work with EVERY people. exit is an option.

[JumpCrisscross]

> not everyone needs to be in a group

Not everyone is in a civilisation. Few people in a civilisation would rather be in e.g. Sudan or Ethiopia.

[consteval]

Right but I don't need to successfully get along with everyone else in the US for the US to be a successful country.

Lower the sizes of groups and increase async communication, and the burden/overhead of management goes down. Groups small enough can manage themselves, in fact.

[627467]

there's over 170mil people in those 2 countries. maybe a majority wishes buy a one-way ticket to Disneyland but a non-irrelevant numbers of people decides to live their dreams and struggles with those nearby in that group. again: not everyone needs to be ANY given group

[JumpCrisscross]

Most people in those countries are part of small groups. Humans are a social species. That doesn’t require anyone to be part of a group. But it’s a bit ridiculous to try and manage a society by assuming it away.

[verisimi]

"the main conundrum" .. is not my conundrum.

[WJW]

I think you missed the point of the GP: Venkatesh Rao has written so much posts around this idea that he's now positioned himself as an authority on the topic of workplace power dynamics, regardless of if what he wrote is actually accurate or not.

He is also quite fond of using poorly defined (in this context) words like "dialectical" and "illegibility" that makes the reader doubt whether he's actually full of shit or that he is actually so brilliant that the reader simply doesn't comprehend him.

[swed420]

ctrl+f for "dialectical" yields no results in the OP. What are you referring to?

[lupire]

That's not what the GP said. That's your contributing opinion.

[mgblogg]

I think the main point of his principle is roughly correct. Classic companies are started by sociopaths and an initial amount of losers. Then the clueless come in the middle of the pyramid. The clueless section expands as the company grows until the company implodes.

I do not agree with his idea of promotion of overachievers into middle management and many other things. Some of his points are self-contradictory.

There are many variations on the main principle like Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy:

https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

(None of this applies applies to startups that are founded by actual programmers.)

[AmericanChopper]

I would say it's more because companies and other organisations are social systems, and your ability to succeed in a social system comes down largely to your social skills. I think people with poor social skills don't understand the importance of them, and therefor don't understand why the people with better social skills are succeeding, and subsequently come up with these post hoc rationalizations that allow them to explain these outcomes without confronting any of their own issues.

[lupire]

You have to define "social skills" in a more specific but non tautological way for this argument to carry weight.

[heresie-dabord]

I'm not the parent commenter but I like your point.

People who have a reason to form a group will cooperate/collaborate best when they have some confidence in one another. People share ideas, projects, and skills, and "read" one another and form bonds. This is a social system. It could be a brief association or have a long duration. It could have a formal context, such as a business or a governmental entity.

Social interactions build people's confidence and sense of value in the group, in the individuals, and the work at hand. The challenge grows exponentially as the population of the group scales. Communication is hard.

An individual's discernment and connectedness (a confidence/value score) within the group will reflect potential for success. Communication matters.

The human plot twist is that there can be dysfunctional social systems as well as dysfunctional individuals.

For a very serious discussion, the great writer Primo Levi published his reflections on his harrowing experiences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primo_Levi

This related article about social systems and connectedness was also recently discussed on HN with much interest: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/the-upstream-cause-of-the-youth...

[AmericanChopper]

You’re reading an awful lot into that person’s question. Social skills are a very basic concept, the wikipedia page for them gives a decent overview. But I’m skeptical that the parent commenter actually misunderstood what I meant, and instead wanted to engage in some debate about organisations valuing the wrong skills or something like that. A debate about the causes of social maladaptation is also not especially relevant to my initial point.

[heresie-dabord]

Cheers! Thanks for your comment.

Your initial point is the simplest explanation for how groups of people self-organise... and meta-organise.

I realise that I went far in explaining and gave far more than I will receive in this case.

But then again, you responded and that's a connection. ^_^

[bloqs]

This is because extraversion is partially composed of assertiveness (big five), which directly indicates your influence on your nearby human environment

[wizzwizz4]

"People get promoted because they influence others" is a description of the problem, not a justification of it.

[JumpCrisscross]

> "People get promoted because they influence others" is a description of the problem

What do you think a leader’s job is?

[wizzwizz4]

To raise others up, and provide an environment where they can do their jobs effectively. Occasionally, to perform coordination tasks, such as deciding on overall strategy, or resolving disputes; more often, a leader delegates but is otherwise hands-off, since most well-functioning teams are largely autonomous. (This is, of course, from the subordinates' perspective: from the leader's perspective, it might look like a lot of putting out fires all of the time.) A leader's job is rarely to self-promote.

[Detrytus]

>To raise others up, and provide an environment where they can do their jobs effectively.

You mean: to influence them?

[mjburgess]

shh, don't explain the correlation. this isn't about understanding, its about pseudo-intellectual envy. "obviously!" the more people speak, regardless of what they say, the more those Other dumb apes will elect them leader. I mean, why, any old fool could read every word from the dictionary and end up CEO!

The Dumb Ape Hypothesis: we are at our most dumb when declaring others so.

[cainxinth]

A related type is the Jargonist, who not only speaks endlessly but in a stream of acronyms, buzz words, and insider coded language.

[lobsterthief]

I prefer Jargonaut

[stonethrowaway]

Name drops?

[cainxinth]

That too

[pelagicAustral]

Goes with my reply to OP [0]. I have a colleague that is a total waste of space. Never finished a project, never wanted to take on advice, always fought on really shady grounds, but he fought everything, almost like it was either his idea of what was on-point or nothing... But he was constantly talking, he was always talking, he is always talking, most of the time about things he doesn't have a clue about... and just a week ago, he got bumped... I don't get it... I honestly do not get what the fuck is wrong with this world.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41215788

[jvanderbot]

You can provide a lot of value to an organization (or a leader) without finishing a single coding project. As an engineer I hate it, but I have worked for good directors and awful directors and usually the good directors do a ton of talking and bitching and moaning. But they also are fortune tellers and crystal balls and expert C-suite anthropologists that make the work valuable rather than just busy.

[pelagicAustral]

Yeah, I mean, I get it... but, how the fuck is this the normal state of affairs?

[jvanderbot]

It's not just normal, it's desirable. You do not want your director / C-suite guy reviewing pull requests, filing bugs, or being obsessed with code library choices. That's what you get when you endlessly promote your busy/productive code-loving IC types.

You want someone who is a naturally fluent speaker, strongly outspoken, who holds strong opinions, and wants to focus on processes and long-term roadmaps and so on. All the stuff a dilligent IC disdains.

[andrewflnr]

That's all worthless if they don't actually have good ideas, though. And I don't believe someone who is all talk actually has good ideas. You have to be rooted in good practice.

[jvanderbot]

If you're free to define "all talk" as "not useful" then yeah - you've created a tautology. All I'm saying is some folks that are awful to work with side by side as technologists are super useful to an org in other places.

One person's 'all talk' is another person's 'all walk'.

[BobaFloutist]

If that's the case, given how much I talk I should be president by now.

[faeriechangling]

Must be why I keep getting promoted.

You might be inverting cause and effect.

[cjbgkagh]

I think there is a different power play at work, if politics are important in a workplace then it benefits you to promote the less competent as they are both less threading at a peer level and they owe their position to you so can be expected to be loyal. A competent person might think they got there on their own and may not be relied on as strongly to take your side in office politics. Of course repeating this process many times rapidly erodes management competence.

This simple process is from an emergent behavior of rational actors acting in accordance to the incentives of the structure. Unlike other theories it does not necessitate irrational actors, morons, or sociopaths. Where you have people you have politics so it almost always occurs just at different speeds, hence the pervasiveness and the inevitability of the cycle of collapse and rebirth. It appears to me that only a highly competent king (someone whose position cannot be threatened by a peer) can stop this process and maybe reverse it.

[the_duke]

Correlation vs causation?

Management has to collect information, disseminate information, coordinate, make decisions and propagate them.

All of that requires a lot of communication, aka talking.

[lupire]

It also requires a lot of listening and reading and thinking, aka not talking.

[bloqs]

This is because extraversion is partially composed of assertiveness (big five), which directly indicates your influence on your nearby human environment