[keyshapegeo99]

Many of the author's rebuttals hinge on the assumption that everyone in an organisation is acting in its interest first - and not their own, often conflicting, self-interest. As such, they are not particularly convincing.

Large organisations absolutely do, as a function of their scale, produce pockets where slackers and incompetents can hide. They'll surround themselves with a web of process, pointless meetings, and substance-free buzzword-heavy documentation/presentations to disguise this fact. Others may become ensnared in this web, and will rightly express the criticisms that the author is attempting to debunk.

[simonask]

I don't think I've ever worked at a company where slacking off was the problem. The vast majority of people want to do good work.

What I _have_ seen is several companies afflicted by this really strange characteristic of the software development industry: We appear to be the only industry on the planet where it is common to pick leaders (executives) that know nothing about the product or how it's made.

You can't run a bridge building company without knowing how to build a bridge. You can't run a law firm without knowing law.

You don't need to know all the nitty gritty - big picture is important - but understanding the product _in depth_ is a requirement in any business.

[WJW]

Are you in a completely different world than me? Because even the CEO of Boeing is not an engineer. Larry Ellison The CEO of the biggest bank in my country holds a masters degree in business economics, but nothing related to finance, econometrics or risk management. The CEO of US steel is an accountant. Don't even get me started on the (non)education of some politicians.

Understanding the product is often important, but equally often it is something you can delegate to others. It's only the younglings that think intimate knowledge of the product is the hallmark of a great leader, because that is the only thing they themselves bring to the table.

[ternaryoperator]

I agree fully with your comment, but I wish to point out that Larry Ellison's was a programmer at the time that the company that became Oracle was founded by him and his co-founders.

[mikeyouse]

I get the point of his comment but it’s just nonsense… plenty of good CEOs aren’t SMEs in the field and plenty of bad ones are. the CEO of Boeing is absolutely an engineer - and so was the CEO during most of the years people consider the worst in Boeing’s quality history with the 737 Max (Muilenburg).

[aleph_minus_one]

> Are you in a completely different world than me? Because even the CEO of Boeing is not an engineer. Larry Ellison The CEO of the biggest bank in my country holds a masters degree in business economics, but nothing related to finance, econometrics or risk management. The CEO of US steel is an accountant.

Specifically the CEO is more like the figurehead of the company; this role is to present and "sell the value" of the company to investors, important customers and partners. So often it is not too worrysome if the CEO has a different background; sometimes this can even make sense.

What should worry one much more is if the leadership layers below come from a very different background than what the company's industry is.

[RaftPeople]

> Because even the CEO of Boeing is not an engineer.

Kelly Ortberg, CEO of Boeing, is an engineer. He has a mechanical engineering degree and started his career as an engineer at Texas Instruments.

[jiggawatts]

> Are you in a completely different world than me? Because even the CEO of Boeing is not an engineer.

Which is widely recognised as the root cause of that once venerable company's slow but inexorable downfall.

[singpolyma3]

It's not always consciously slacking off. For example when I was at Google most of the team was simply incompetent. They thought they were smart (PhDs!) and working hard. But they refused to work together. They estimated tasks in weeks and months and at the end of my time there after I'd done very little due to obstruction by other teams I was praised for my high productivity.

I never saw anyone just sitting around or really slacking. But they couldn't execute anything. It was depressing.

[Aeolun]

> The vast majority of people want to do good work.

The vast majority of people have convinced themselves they’re doing good work. Then reject any suggestion they could do it better (including me).

[saagarjha]

Knowing how your product works does not actually solve the problem of running a large company.

[simonask]

No, but how are you going to run a sausage factory when you haven’t the slightest how the sausage is made?

[saagarjha]

Hire someone who does?

[pelorat]

Indeed. Most people who seek employment at big tech do so because of the money, not because of the mission.

[heyitsdaad]

Spot on. There are disproportionately few people who care for the product. Most people care for making that fat promotion package so they can move up. Both eng and non eng.

[rob_c]

I think this is akin to x% of the worker ants doing all the work. Once you get to a big enough scale and have to delegate I'm sure every company hits this.

I just wish we didn't have to rely on hiring 100 on paper workers for 5 excellent people committed to the company...

[andrewflnr]

I read it as saying that even if you solved the incentive misalignments, you would still have very similar annoying symptoms to what people complain about today. So you have to be careful in looking at any particular annoyance to disentangle which aspects of it are inherent complexity to a large company and which are BS. But I already believed that, so I may be steelmanning the article too much.