Part of the issue is that there’s a cluster of issues that overlap and are kinda fuzzy and if you try to pin them down you might miss the forest for the trees. I think (unfortunately) that reading the full set of Quotes on Moral Mazes.
I think it’s possible to do a better job summarizing than Zvi has currently done. My current attempt at the cluster of patterns are:
Middle managers end up focusing on success within the ecosystem of middle-management, which is increasingly (or entirely) divorced from any object level value that the organization is actually producing.
Because it’s hard to evaluate middle managers, the evaluation ends up being almost entirely ‘politics’.
This self-reinforces for the reasons Zvi describes in this post.
The ecosystem ends up punishing attempts to be communicate clearly about ethics, and about the object level output of the company (since often those are politically inconvenient)
The ecosystem ends up forcing you to self-modify to select all your hobbies/life/politics/family around company politics, and in the process also self-modify to be more ethically comfortable with how the maze is set up.
Would “maze behavior = playing company politics, especially punishment of attempts to communicate clearly about ethics and object level output” be a good way to sum it up? (Or is it missing something important?)
Without anchoring anyone too much on my question elsewhere in the thread: I would say that this is certainly a central case of maze behavior and points in the correct direction, but as a definition of all maze behavior it is importantly too small a class of things. There is something more fundamental going on, and it is a Fnord (I have Fnord as the top of my future post pile, where Fnord is a thing that makes you want to not notice look at it or notice it.)
I think it’s technically right, but something like “company politics is more horrifying than you think in subtle ways” that people will tend to gloss over, or something.
Part of the issue is that there’s a cluster of issues that overlap and are kinda fuzzy and if you try to pin them down you might miss the forest for the trees. I think (unfortunately) that reading the full set of Quotes on Moral Mazes.
I think it’s possible to do a better job summarizing than Zvi has currently done. My current attempt at the cluster of patterns are:
Middle managers end up focusing on success within the ecosystem of middle-management, which is increasingly (or entirely) divorced from any object level value that the organization is actually producing.
Because it’s hard to evaluate middle managers, the evaluation ends up being almost entirely ‘politics’.
This self-reinforces for the reasons Zvi describes in this post.
The ecosystem ends up punishing attempts to be communicate clearly about ethics, and about the object level output of the company (since often those are politically inconvenient)
The ecosystem ends up forcing you to self-modify to select all your hobbies/life/politics/family around company politics, and in the process also self-modify to be more ethically comfortable with how the maze is set up.
Would “maze behavior = playing company politics, especially punishment of attempts to communicate clearly about ethics and object level output” be a good way to sum it up? (Or is it missing something important?)
Without anchoring anyone too much on my question elsewhere in the thread: I would say that this is certainly a central case of maze behavior and points in the correct direction, but as a definition of all maze behavior it is importantly too small a class of things. There is something more fundamental going on, and it is a Fnord (I have Fnord as the top of my future post pile, where Fnord is a thing that makes you want to not notice look at it or notice it.)
I think it’s technically right, but something like “company politics is more horrifying than you think in subtle ways” that people will tend to gloss over, or something.