This matches my experience. To paraphrase Cory Doctorow, corporate leadership likes to sit in the back of the car and pretend they drive with a Fischer Price steering wheel. This fact is deeply embarrassing and thus anything that increases the illusion of control, even when obviously deleterious to the company is small price to be paid.
This makes sense to me. I bet this decision was made by someone who makes millions a year but could not do the job of any person in the company that makes less than $100,000/year without significant training.
Honestly, Picard asked a very relevant question to the modern age. What if our societal standards aren't what we thought they were, and we've just had rose-tinted glasses convincing ourselves otherwise. Of course, we never saw them actually deal with that properly, but S1 was a much more interesting series than S2 and S3 were.
The writers flat out rejected Roddenberry's vision of a better future and here's a take on why. We've reached a point in culture of deep pessimism about humanity, and so the characters in Picard are just as dysfunctional as we are.
Another reason is that actual utopias make for pretty boring writing. Humanity convinced itself that they lived in a perfect world, but most of the writing was about the cracks in that facade. Even the preachy and awful first season of TNG had the character of Q demonstrating that we still had a long way to go.
This tends to come up every time flat structures are discussed and it seems like such a failure of imagination that anything other than strict hierarchies could work, despite plenty of counter-examples like Valve. Yes, some people do badly in an environment where you have to have convince people rather than use power to get things done. However the problems with traditional hierarchies are so well known people assume them to be innate. I'm tired of it being normal to have an incompetent boss.
That's because flat structures are often, or often turn into, "flat-in-name-only" structures.
I don't think the Tyranny of Structurelessness is arguing in favour of hierarchy, or against other forms of organization than hierarchy.
I don't think it's arguing against "flat" or "anarchy" style organizations either.
In essence, I think it's asking us to do whatever we're doing better, more honestly, more effectively, and less stressfully. By acknowledging, clarifying, communicating, and seeking to understand the real operating structures, what's really going on. And then to improve them, using that understanding.
An actually flat organization might be good, I don't know. I've never seen one. I've been in some that claimed to be flat, and became stressful places to work, for the same usual reasons hierarchies can be unpleasant, including incompetent bosses (not called bosses). But I've also had some pleasant experiences in flat organizations, and I prefer it that way, if it's designed and run well.
You don't need strict hierarchies, necessarily (in fact I don't believe 'traditional' hierarchies are in practice ever actually ironclad: the org chart is only ever an approximation of the real power structure). It's more that you should plan your power structure carefully (many forms are possible!), and ideally make it as transparent as possible, as pretending that you won't have one at all is merely an illusion (you will never completely succeed! Firstly because power structures are, in their full glory, ludicrously complex and ever-shifting, but also because hidden information is itself a form of power)
the argument isn't that flat organizations don't work, but that they're even more insidious than actual hierarchies. Zizek gives two great examples of the startup and the modern family. In the startup your boss is still your boss, except officially he's your friend, so you can't even hold him accountable, because there are no bosses. (political analog, traditional socialist parties, we're all comrades so better don't think anything wrong)
In the non-hierarchical family you aren't just ordered to dress up and go see grandma, you're guilt tripped into feeling bad about not seeing grandma, until you do it out of "your own volition". In the non-hierarchy you're not just supposed to be outwardly obedient but free on the inside, you're supposed to be obedient on the inside too. They work well, really well. Unlike the traditional hierarchy the tyranny is absolute because it has no borders and doesn't have to acknowledge itself.
>However the problems with traditional hierarchies are so well known
exactly, because they're visible. Valve, despite its utopian conditions, is weirdly enough, very secretive
Given the top 10% holds 87% of shares, it seems clear the stock market is primarily a tool to compound wealth. Having a surplus of money is table stakes to play.
What if, and hear me out, we asked the people a new employee has been onboarding with? I know, trusting people to make a fair judgment lacks the ass-covering desired by most legal departments but actually listening to the people who have to work with a new hire is an idea so crazy it might just work.
Unfortunately many providers don't expose all the state used to create certain resources through the API, so there's no way to download the real source of truth after the fact.
If your only exposure to static typing is six months of TS, what you are missing is experience. You're still on the learning curve and thus the cognitive load of explicit types is high, but with time the opposite becomes true.
A poor manager in a structureless org is only going to have as much influence as their popularity allows. While this may cause damage, it pales in comparison to a bad manager in a traditional hierarchy who has the power to force their decisions.
