A priori, I’d say any enlisted/NCO would prefer being an officer (if they didn’t have to work for it, etc.)
Most people would like to have a higher-status role. That doesn’t mean it’s not a separate profession requiring different skills.
Most managers are not executives.
That’s true. I didn’t mean to conflate the two, but to offer engineers vs. their managers as another example of distinct subordinate and superior classes where it makes sense to have two hierarchies.
Now, why are these treated as different professions rather than as different levels of the same professions?
Partly because they are in a large degree different professions requiring different skills, and not translating experience well.
I didn’t mean to conflate the two, but to offer engineers vs. their managers as another example of distinct subordinate and superior classes where it makes sense to have two hierarchies.
Indeed, I’ve heard people make the argument that only having a single hierarchy is a common problem in the field of software engineering, since it forces programmers who want to be promoted to do a job they’re not necessarily well-suited for, and which they might not like. Having separate “programming” and “management” promotion tracks was considered a clearly superior alternative.
Surely there are not two alternatives being compared here but three. (1) A single hierarchy with programmers at the bottom and managers at the top and fairly straightforward progression all the way up. (2) Two hierarchies, one for programmers, one for managers, with the managerial one viewed as above the programmers’ one. (3) Two hierarchies, one for programmers, one for managers, truly parallel, with comparable levels of status and pay available on both.
There is an obvious reason for programmers (and others) to prefer #3 to #1 because it allows people to carry on doing what they’re good at and enjoy, but #2 (which is what one typically gets in practice, and I would strongly suspect it even when there are notionally parallel hierarchies) is not such a clear improvement.
Two hierarchies, one for programmers, one for managers, with the managerial one viewed as above the programmers’ one.
What does “above” mean? Managers necessarily tell the programmers what to do a lot of the time; that’s just part of managing people. For humans, this seems to be inescapably tied to higher social status.
Is there a separate sense of “above” you refer to? Higher paychecks for managers are common. But then I might as well ask the more general question of why different job-tracks have different paychecks at similar levels of experience, seniority, and skill percentile. There are various reasons; one is that the top-level executives deciding on paycheck policy are usually promoted from the top ranks of the management track, rather than a technical one.
Managers necessarily tell the programmers what to do a lot of the time
In principle, that two-hierarchy system, #3 above could allow for true parallelism: The most senior people on the technical ladder would have a boss, like anyone else, but this boss would be someone who is way up the management ladder. Also, in this hypothetical system, the top non-manager technical people would have similar compensation to top managers.
In practice, the most senior people on the ladder simply merge into the management ladder, so that at that point there is no non-management technical ladder.
Some companies have option #2, a technical ladder for non-managers, where the managerial ladder is strictly superior in terms of informal social status and compensation. A few very advanced companies may offer #3 or something like it.
To the extent they do, we see another case of two ladders, but this time with a very obvious reason, much less a mystery than the officer/enlisted or exec/manager distinction.
Partly because they are in a large degree different professions requiring
different skills, and not translating experience well.
Officers might not be so good at doing sergeant work, and doctors not so good at nurses’ work, but no doctor would get in trouble with the law for doing a nurse’s work, but vice versa, the nurse would. Likewise for officers and NCOs.
In practice, that might be true, but this whole thread is asking why the official distinction exists.
I’ve seen many doctors who couldn’t do a nurse’s work. They could maybe fill in for an hour if no-one else was available, but they couldn’t really replace one.
Soldiers are a special case because junior officers lead their men into battle. So officers, at least young and fit ones, should be able to replace ordinary soldiers.
this whole thread is asking why the official distinction exists.
My best answer has two parts.
The first is the exaggeration of status differences that happens when two different professions work closely together. Any initial difference in status—maybe one profession has a higher bar to entry (diploma / entrance exam / professional licensing), or maybe it’s a historical artifact (noble officers with commissions vs. drafted soldiers), or maybe one is the manager of the other and gets to order them around. Then the “upper class” tries to preserve the “gap” and prevent the formation of just such a single-ladder system as you describe. The upper class closes ranks against the lower class to prevent social mobility, as it were.
The second factor is that the two classes are at least partially distinct professions and require different training or qualifications. So any new people coming into the system have already decided which class they belong to.
I’ve seen many doctors who couldn’t do a nurse’s work.
Sure. But the System doesn’t think that way. A nurse can get in trouble with the law for doing what a doctor does. can a doctor get in trouble with the law for doing what a nurse does?
it’s a historical artifact
Yes, that’s it.
maybe one is the manager of the other and gets to order them around.
No, most managers are not execs.
are at least partially distinct professions
I can’t see much qualitative difference between the” professions” of senior manager and executive , except for this implicit presumption of agentiness.
Agreed. There is no qualitative difference between senior manager and executive beyond the increased scope of responsibilities and scale with which your decisions affect others, both of which could be attributed to the word “agentiness.”
Sure. But the System doesn’t think that way. A nurse can get in trouble with the law for doing what a doctor does. can a doctor get in trouble with the law for doing what a nurse does?
Perhaps there’s simply no need for legislation that would prevent a doctor from working as a nurse. No doctor would even consider this option unless the situation is seriously screwed up. A nurse working as a doctor can do much more damage than a doctor working as a nurse. Or put in another way, an incompetent doctor will do much more damage than an incompetent nurse.
A doctor has responsibility over many more patients. A doctor’s competence is more complex, so he has more ways to screw up. A doctor can make more autonomous decisions, often makes them alone, and can’t as easily ask help from others. He also leads a team, so he doesn’t have to execute all his mistakes himself.
A doctor has responsibility over many more patients, often an order of magnitude more
I disagree with your implication. Most doctors and nurses are responsible for specific treatment aspects of a few tens or hundreds of individuals. A small minority of doctors influence larger numbers (e.g. department heads), but even then many of their instructions are carried out by nurses and junior doctors.
A doctor’s competence is more complex, so he has more ways to screw up.
Nurses who administer treatments have ways to screw up that are not available to doctors who merely select those treatments. A doctor can order a harmful procedure; a nurse can actually administer the wrong drug by mistake. A doctor can make a mistake in surgery; a nurse can make a mistake in intensive care.
I think empirical data is needed to elucidate the amount of mistakes (or “responsibility”) owned by doctors and nurses. It’s not something that can be clearly deduced from first principles.
You disagree with the implication or the claim? Do you disagree with it completely or do you think it’s exaggerated? ETA: It seems it was exaggerated, but right. There are about 3 nurses per doctor on average in OECD countries.
but even then many of their instructions are carried out by nurses and junior doctors.
That’s one of the key points I made. A nurse can’t make other people carry out mistaken orders. A person carrying out a mistaken order isn’t necessarily incompetent, although in easy to spot cases they are.
Nurses who administer treatments have ways to screw up that are not available to doctors who merely select those treatments.
Sure. A doctor has hundreds (or thousands) of diagnoses and medications to choose from. That makes me pretty confident that he has more options for fatal mistakes, and that the probability of doing the right thing is much lower.
I think the more difficult question is what constitutes incompetence, and what levels of incompetence are comparable in nurses and doctors. I strongly suspect that our main disagreement comes from this aspect.
I think I agree what Joshua said here so debating this point much further isn’t of much interest anymore.
You disagree with the implication or the claim? Do you disagree with it completely or do you think it’s exaggerated?
The claim was that doctors are responsible for more patients. I’m not sure that is correct; your link about there being more nurses says,
Nurses play a critical role in providing health care not only in traditional settings such as hospitals and long-term care institutions but increasingly in primary care (especially in offering care to the chronically ill) and in home care settings.
Anyway, what I meant by the ‘implication’ (should have elaborated, sorry) was the implicit claim that because doctors have responsibility over more patients, that means they can do more damage if they screw up. But even if a single doctor does more damage than a single nurse (and I’m not sure of that), 5% of doctors screwing up would still do the same amount of damage as 5% of nurses screwing up.
A doctor has hundreds (or thousands) of diagnoses and medications to choose from.
A doctor knows thousand of diagnoses but for a patient complaining of knee pain most of them are completely irrelevant and would never be diagnosed by mistake.
Also, a nurse can administer any treatment a doctor can prescribe, so nurses also have theoretically thousands of medications to administer by mistake.
Finally, most nurse also has a range of mistakes, having to do with physically taking care of the patient, which aren’t available to most doctors, who don’t perform dangerous procedures every day.
even if a single doctor does more damage than a single nurse (and I’m not sure of that), 5% of doctors screwing up would still do the same amount of damage as 5% of nurses screwing up.
Certainly true but not relevant.
A doctor knows thousand of diagnoses but for a patient complaining of knee pain most of them are completely irrelevant...
Fair enough. We could continue this forever, but I wouldn’t find that especially rewarding. I quote myself:
I think the more difficult question is what constitutes incompetence, and what levels of incompetence are comparable in nurses and doctors. I strongly suspect that our main disagreement comes from this aspect.
Which requires more incompetence: making a wrong diagnosis and prescribing the wrong medication, or giving the wrong medication, when you’re given the name of the medication? I’d say the latter, and so they wouldn’t be comparable.
Let’s take a hypothetical but rather typically populated 24 patient hospital unit with 1-2 doctors and say 4-8 nurses on shift, plus other staff. Let’s assume they’re all competent.
Replace one doctor with an incompetent doctor, or, replace one one nurse with an incompetent nurse. Do you seriously not see any difference?
can a doctor get in trouble with the law for doing what a nurse does?
I don’t think MDs are automatically allowed to practice as nurses, if that’s what you mean. Also, nurses have specialization just like doctors do, and only those with the needed training and certification are allowed to perform various special procedures. And I’m pretty sure doctors aren’t allowed to perform those procedures.
Why does it matter? MDs are special in the eyes of the law, but that’s just something special to MDs, and indended to curb malpractice and charlatans, not just to preserve a guild’s power. Executives aren’t a legally special class. For army officers the question doesn’t arise.
I can’t see much qualitative difference between the” professions” of senior manager and executive , except for this implicit presumption of agentiness.
I can’t see much segregation between the two, either. Senior managers often become execs. Maybe it’s a difference in the corporate cultures of our experiences, and your agentiness model fits the culture you describe.
I’m pretty sure that executives have legal liabilities that non-execs lack, although that might apply in most cases just to the top execs.
For army officers the question doesn’t arise.
The question of being legally allowed to do certain things? There are lots of duties in the army that only an officer can legally do but an NCO cannot, but not the other way around.
in the corporate cultures of our experiences,
I’m thinking of very large companies, including those I have worked in; and those I have read about. Startups allow agentiness to everyone.
I’m pretty sure that executives have legal liabilities that non-execs lack, although that might apply in most cases just to the top execs.
Particular roles (CEO, board member, CFO, …) have particular legal responsibilities. I don’t think there’s any law addressing executives or “top executives” as a class.
There are lots of duties in the army that only an officer can legally do but an NCO cannot, but not the other way around.
There are roles that require being an officer, sure. But more technically, they always require being an officer of a certain minimum grade. Other positions require being a non-officer of a certain grade or above. And plenty of technical positions require specific training and certification, regardless of officer status.
I’m thinking of very large companies, including those I have worked in; and those I have read about. Startups allow agentiness to everyone.
I would describe it as startups requiring agentiness from almost everyone qualified to work in a startup. Otherwise it becomes just a small company and probably fails.
The startup where I work is just now transitioning into a post-investment non-startup company with a board of managers. And so, for the first time, we’re explicitly looking to hire non-agenty people to fill some junior roles. Agentiness is very much the word I’d use to describe some of our staffing decisions. But we still don’t have anything like an exec vs. everyone else distinction. I’m one of two technical architects, a programmer, very agenty, and definitely not an “executive” (and I don’t have any legally binding duties beyond an ordinary employee with a contract).
Most people would like to have a higher-status role. That doesn’t mean it’s not a separate profession requiring different skills.
That’s true. I didn’t mean to conflate the two, but to offer engineers vs. their managers as another example of distinct subordinate and superior classes where it makes sense to have two hierarchies.
Partly because they are in a large degree different professions requiring different skills, and not translating experience well.
Indeed, I’ve heard people make the argument that only having a single hierarchy is a common problem in the field of software engineering, since it forces programmers who want to be promoted to do a job they’re not necessarily well-suited for, and which they might not like. Having separate “programming” and “management” promotion tracks was considered a clearly superior alternative.
Surely there are not two alternatives being compared here but three. (1) A single hierarchy with programmers at the bottom and managers at the top and fairly straightforward progression all the way up. (2) Two hierarchies, one for programmers, one for managers, with the managerial one viewed as above the programmers’ one. (3) Two hierarchies, one for programmers, one for managers, truly parallel, with comparable levels of status and pay available on both.
There is an obvious reason for programmers (and others) to prefer #3 to #1 because it allows people to carry on doing what they’re good at and enjoy, but #2 (which is what one typically gets in practice, and I would strongly suspect it even when there are notionally parallel hierarchies) is not such a clear improvement.
What does “above” mean? Managers necessarily tell the programmers what to do a lot of the time; that’s just part of managing people. For humans, this seems to be inescapably tied to higher social status.
Is there a separate sense of “above” you refer to? Higher paychecks for managers are common. But then I might as well ask the more general question of why different job-tracks have different paychecks at similar levels of experience, seniority, and skill percentile. There are various reasons; one is that the top-level executives deciding on paycheck policy are usually promoted from the top ranks of the management track, rather than a technical one.
In principle, that two-hierarchy system, #3 above could allow for true parallelism: The most senior people on the technical ladder would have a boss, like anyone else, but this boss would be someone who is way up the management ladder. Also, in this hypothetical system, the top non-manager technical people would have similar compensation to top managers.
In practice, the most senior people on the ladder simply merge into the management ladder, so that at that point there is no non-management technical ladder.
So, #2 above is far more common.
Some companies have option #2, a technical ladder for non-managers, where the managerial ladder is strictly superior in terms of informal social status and compensation. A few very advanced companies may offer #3 or something like it.
To the extent they do, we see another case of two ladders, but this time with a very obvious reason, much less a mystery than the officer/enlisted or exec/manager distinction.
Officers might not be so good at doing sergeant work, and doctors not so good at nurses’ work, but no doctor would get in trouble with the law for doing a nurse’s work, but vice versa, the nurse would. Likewise for officers and NCOs. In practice, that might be true, but this whole thread is asking why the official distinction exists.
[edited for brevity]
I’ve seen many doctors who couldn’t do a nurse’s work. They could maybe fill in for an hour if no-one else was available, but they couldn’t really replace one.
Soldiers are a special case because junior officers lead their men into battle. So officers, at least young and fit ones, should be able to replace ordinary soldiers.
My best answer has two parts.
The first is the exaggeration of status differences that happens when two different professions work closely together. Any initial difference in status—maybe one profession has a higher bar to entry (diploma / entrance exam / professional licensing), or maybe it’s a historical artifact (noble officers with commissions vs. drafted soldiers), or maybe one is the manager of the other and gets to order them around. Then the “upper class” tries to preserve the “gap” and prevent the formation of just such a single-ladder system as you describe. The upper class closes ranks against the lower class to prevent social mobility, as it were.
The second factor is that the two classes are at least partially distinct professions and require different training or qualifications. So any new people coming into the system have already decided which class they belong to.
Sure. But the System doesn’t think that way. A nurse can get in trouble with the law for doing what a doctor does. can a doctor get in trouble with the law for doing what a nurse does?
Yes, that’s it.
No, most managers are not execs.
I can’t see much qualitative difference between the” professions” of senior manager and executive , except for this implicit presumption of agentiness.
Agreed. There is no qualitative difference between senior manager and executive beyond the increased scope of responsibilities and scale with which your decisions affect others, both of which could be attributed to the word “agentiness.”
Could well be, but why does this concept of “executive” as a distinct group exist? Why not just have some managers who are more senior than others.
Perhaps there’s simply no need for legislation that would prevent a doctor from working as a nurse. No doctor would even consider this option unless the situation is seriously screwed up. A nurse working as a doctor can do much more damage than a doctor working as a nurse. Or put in another way, an incompetent doctor will do much more damage than an incompetent nurse.
I don’t see why. Either can kill the patients they work with, or set bad standards for other doctors/nurses.
A doctor has responsibility over many more patients. A doctor’s competence is more complex, so he has more ways to screw up. A doctor can make more autonomous decisions, often makes them alone, and can’t as easily ask help from others. He also leads a team, so he doesn’t have to execute all his mistakes himself.
I disagree with your implication. Most doctors and nurses are responsible for specific treatment aspects of a few tens or hundreds of individuals. A small minority of doctors influence larger numbers (e.g. department heads), but even then many of their instructions are carried out by nurses and junior doctors.
Nurses who administer treatments have ways to screw up that are not available to doctors who merely select those treatments. A doctor can order a harmful procedure; a nurse can actually administer the wrong drug by mistake. A doctor can make a mistake in surgery; a nurse can make a mistake in intensive care.
I think empirical data is needed to elucidate the amount of mistakes (or “responsibility”) owned by doctors and nurses. It’s not something that can be clearly deduced from first principles.
You disagree with the implication or the claim? Do you disagree with it completely or do you think it’s exaggerated? ETA: It seems it was exaggerated, but right. There are about 3 nurses per doctor on average in OECD countries.
That’s one of the key points I made. A nurse can’t make other people carry out mistaken orders. A person carrying out a mistaken order isn’t necessarily incompetent, although in easy to spot cases they are.
Sure. A doctor has hundreds (or thousands) of diagnoses and medications to choose from. That makes me pretty confident that he has more options for fatal mistakes, and that the probability of doing the right thing is much lower.
I think the more difficult question is what constitutes incompetence, and what levels of incompetence are comparable in nurses and doctors. I strongly suspect that our main disagreement comes from this aspect.
I think I agree what Joshua said here so debating this point much further isn’t of much interest anymore.
The claim was that doctors are responsible for more patients. I’m not sure that is correct; your link about there being more nurses says,
Anyway, what I meant by the ‘implication’ (should have elaborated, sorry) was the implicit claim that because doctors have responsibility over more patients, that means they can do more damage if they screw up. But even if a single doctor does more damage than a single nurse (and I’m not sure of that), 5% of doctors screwing up would still do the same amount of damage as 5% of nurses screwing up.
A doctor knows thousand of diagnoses but for a patient complaining of knee pain most of them are completely irrelevant and would never be diagnosed by mistake.
Also, a nurse can administer any treatment a doctor can prescribe, so nurses also have theoretically thousands of medications to administer by mistake.
Finally, most nurse also has a range of mistakes, having to do with physically taking care of the patient, which aren’t available to most doctors, who don’t perform dangerous procedures every day.
Certainly true but not relevant.
Fair enough. We could continue this forever, but I wouldn’t find that especially rewarding. I quote myself:
Which requires more incompetence: making a wrong diagnosis and prescribing the wrong medication, or giving the wrong medication, when you’re given the name of the medication? I’d say the latter, and so they wouldn’t be comparable.
Peace out.
I don’t think that degree of damage is the essential point. Both can do significant damage.
Let’s take a hypothetical but rather typically populated 24 patient hospital unit with 1-2 doctors and say 4-8 nurses on shift, plus other staff. Let’s assume they’re all competent.
Replace one doctor with an incompetent doctor, or, replace one one nurse with an incompetent nurse. Do you seriously not see any difference?
I’m pretty sure you misunderstood what I said. Read it again. If not, try to think of examples more broadly. Your example misses the point.
Edited to be less snarky.
Thanks, I’ve edited it.
Yeah. Sorry about the hostile tone.
I don’t think MDs are automatically allowed to practice as nurses, if that’s what you mean. Also, nurses have specialization just like doctors do, and only those with the needed training and certification are allowed to perform various special procedures. And I’m pretty sure doctors aren’t allowed to perform those procedures.
Why does it matter? MDs are special in the eyes of the law, but that’s just something special to MDs, and indended to curb malpractice and charlatans, not just to preserve a guild’s power. Executives aren’t a legally special class. For army officers the question doesn’t arise.
I can’t see much segregation between the two, either. Senior managers often become execs. Maybe it’s a difference in the corporate cultures of our experiences, and your agentiness model fits the culture you describe.
I’m pretty sure that executives have legal liabilities that non-execs lack, although that might apply in most cases just to the top execs.
The question of being legally allowed to do certain things? There are lots of duties in the army that only an officer can legally do but an NCO cannot, but not the other way around.
I’m thinking of very large companies, including those I have worked in; and those I have read about. Startups allow agentiness to everyone.
Particular roles (CEO, board member, CFO, …) have particular legal responsibilities. I don’t think there’s any law addressing executives or “top executives” as a class.
There are roles that require being an officer, sure. But more technically, they always require being an officer of a certain minimum grade. Other positions require being a non-officer of a certain grade or above. And plenty of technical positions require specific training and certification, regardless of officer status.
I would describe it as startups requiring agentiness from almost everyone qualified to work in a startup. Otherwise it becomes just a small company and probably fails.
The startup where I work is just now transitioning into a post-investment non-startup company with a board of managers. And so, for the first time, we’re explicitly looking to hire non-agenty people to fill some junior roles. Agentiness is very much the word I’d use to describe some of our staffing decisions. But we still don’t have anything like an exec vs. everyone else distinction. I’m one of two technical architects, a programmer, very agenty, and definitely not an “executive” (and I don’t have any legally binding duties beyond an ordinary employee with a contract).
Interesting example of non-agentiness being considered a plus for some jobs.
It’s not a plus, it’s an acceptable minus, a trade-off vs. a lower paycheck.