Of course wonderful bounties etc. exist because that’s what competitive organizations optimize for! If they optimized something that people don’t want to buy, they would be out-competed by someone else.
Mazes are internal politics (mostly), or they’re internal to many related organizations.
I’ve also pointed out that there’s strong negative feedback that affects how maze-like organizations can become – coming from outside those organizations. Even other organizations that are very maze-like often directly depend on products or services being (mostly) delivered by other organizations, regardless of their maze-likeness. That is a very real restraint on mazes just because they are costly.
And you’re right that competition – between organizations – should constraint the growth or maintenance of mazes; and it does. It also reduces slack, a prime target of maze-runners, but also reduces everything else, e.g. wages, employee work-life balance, and overall profits.
But there’s also a very real difference between ‘appropriating’ a significant portion of the organization’s profits and literally losing money. Note that the latter directly threatens the maze-runners too.
What might be a little hard to keep track of separately is that maze-runners are the kind of people that are generally willing to engage in rent seeking, regulatory capture, and other anti-competitive behavior to better secure the profits/resources they’re appropriating.
It would probably be very useful if we had even a rough measure of competitiveness for different markets or industries. If we did, I’d bet that competitiveness is inversely correlated with maze-likeness.
But Zvi wasn’t claiming that ‘super-perfect competition’ between organizations would produce or promote mazes. It’s super-perfect competition within insulated levels of managerial hierarchies that does. It’s super-perfect competition in one particular labor market – middle managers – that causes mazes.
… restaurants generally aren’t mazes.
Why do you believe that? Have you worked in a restaurant?
I would suspect the reason that restaurants aren’t maze-like is that most of them are small and relatively flat hierarchies. A LOT of them don’t make any money, ever, either.
(I’ve long considered restaurants as a class to be a weird form of unintended charity. Restaurant-goers (hopefully) get to eat good food and servers and cooks and others get jobs. But a lot of restaurant owners get nothing (financially).)
Mazes can’t survive competition.
All-else-equal, mazes are opposed by competition. But so is everything else. And perfect competition is such a bizarre situation that it will probably never literally hold, tho we may (in the far future) approach it asymptotically.
But mazes can survive any particular amount of competition strictly less than perfect even if we rightly expect them to be smaller and less severe in the face of more competition than otherwise.
Why do you believe that? Have you worked in a restaurant?
Isolated demand for rigor, but yes I have.
There are no bullshit jobs in restaurants, there’s no ambiguity about what people should be doing, people’s employment status usually depends much more heavily on performance than in mazes, etc.
I would suspect the reason that restaurants aren’t maze-like is that most of them are small and relatively flat hierarchies. A LOT of them don’t make any money, ever, either.
I agree with you here, but I think this isn’t an accident. Larger companies become more maze like, but mazes can’t survive competition, so companies under intense competition have to stay small to avoid becoming mazes.
How is that an isolated demand for rigor? I asked why (or how) you believed what you claimed and that seemed like pertinent info. I think you misinterpreted me as implying that you couldn’t have a good reason because you hadn’t worked at a restaurant before (and, further, also implying that if you had, you’d agree with me). I was really just curious why you believe what you claimed. I can’t imagine what history of me you consulted to conclude that my question to you was an isolated demand; care to share what that was?
Personally, I’ve worked at two restaurants, mostly delivering food at both. One was a pizza restaurant that also had on-site dining, i.e. had a sit-down full-service also. Another was just a delivery (or pickup) pizza restaurant. I’ve also worked at a ‘smoothie shop’, which is probably legally considered a restaurant or something similar, but is also not a prototypical ‘restaurant’.
There are no bullshit jobs in restaurants, there’s no ambiguity about what people should be doing, people’s employment status usually depends much more heavily on performance than in mazes, etc.
These are really absolute statements! [Emphasis mine in some quotes of you below.]
“There are no bullshit jobs in restaurants” – that’s absolutely not true! Many restaurants have been killed because of someone with a bullshit job, e.g. an owner with a bullshit manager job. I would agree with ‘there are few or fewer bullshit jobs in restaurants compared to other businesses’, but I’m not even sure that it’s that true compared to similarly sized businesses.
“there’s no ambiguity about what people should be doing” – this is also absolutely not true! Any business, even successful restaurants, aren’t busy with ‘direct work’ at every single moment. What should people be doing during ‘down time’? Whatever the answer is, it wasn’t obvious to me – i.e. there IS ambiguity – every time that happened and various managers frequently asked me to perform wildly different tasks or projects. And even in ‘crunch time’ it’s not always obvious what people should be doing? At the smoothie shop at which I worked I would often have to decide something like ‘Should I continue taking orders or help filling orders or should I start washing some of the blender containers now instead?’. And sometimes I was the effective manager at the time, so I’d have to make a decision – resolve that particular ambiguity myself. And this – resolving or handling ambiguity – is exactly what a good manager in a restaurant or similar business does that’s so valuable.
“people’s employment status usually depends much more heavily on performance than in mazes” – you’re begging the question as you’re assuming restaurants aren’t mazes. Maybe you would be surprised that, in my experience, some people are retained (i.e. their “employment status” remains ‘employed’) long after their performance demonstrates that they should be let go. I’ve found smaller businesses to be less ruthless, generally, about firing people than larger businesses. I think your statement is also ambiguous because a person’s ‘performance’ – in a maze – is a very really thing even if it’s not object-level productivity. That’s a part of why they’re so toxic! They actively corrupt more objective measures of productivity and thus performance.
Larger companies become more maze like, but mazes can’t survive competition, so companies under intense competition have to stay small to avoid becoming mazes.
I don’t agree that mazes can’t survive competition. I think mazes are parasitic on { direct / object level } productivity. But, like biological parasites, the fact that the productive organization or living organism is under intense competition doesn’t out-right prohibit mazes or parasitism. And, because most competition is most intense between or among similar organizations or organisms (i.e. within an industry or niche or species), and because both mazes and parasites are generally contagious, we should expect similar organizations or organisms to have (roughly) similar levels of either.
‘Competition’ is also ambiguous. ‘Anti-competitive’ behavior is one one (very real) sense ‘cheating’, but in another (also very real) sense it’s just another move in the larger game, on another ‘level’. Mazes and parasites are also under (sometimes intense) competition, so we should expect a general ‘arms race’ between maze-runners and the productive portion of an organization and between parasites and ‘productive’ organisms. And maybe even ‘symbiosis’ is more like the ‘loser’ eking out some kind of advantage from what was formerly a purer parasite.
I think competition provides a relatively modest negative ‘pressure’ against mazes, but there’s no level of competition that prevents them from forming or actively destroys them. I think mazes are more often a chronic, and sometimes terminal, condition that afflicts any and every organization to a considerable degree.
Mazes are internal politics (mostly), or they’re internal to many related organizations.
I’ve also pointed out that there’s strong negative feedback that affects how maze-like organizations can become – coming from outside those organizations. Even other organizations that are very maze-like often directly depend on products or services being (mostly) delivered by other organizations, regardless of their maze-likeness. That is a very real restraint on mazes just because they are costly.
And you’re right that competition – between organizations – should constraint the growth or maintenance of mazes; and it does. It also reduces slack, a prime target of maze-runners, but also reduces everything else, e.g. wages, employee work-life balance, and overall profits.
But there’s also a very real difference between ‘appropriating’ a significant portion of the organization’s profits and literally losing money. Note that the latter directly threatens the maze-runners too.
What might be a little hard to keep track of separately is that maze-runners are the kind of people that are generally willing to engage in rent seeking, regulatory capture, and other anti-competitive behavior to better secure the profits/resources they’re appropriating.
It would probably be very useful if we had even a rough measure of competitiveness for different markets or industries. If we did, I’d bet that competitiveness is inversely correlated with maze-likeness.
But Zvi wasn’t claiming that ‘super-perfect competition’ between organizations would produce or promote mazes. It’s super-perfect competition within insulated levels of managerial hierarchies that does. It’s super-perfect competition in one particular labor market – middle managers – that causes mazes.
Why do you believe that? Have you worked in a restaurant?
I would suspect the reason that restaurants aren’t maze-like is that most of them are small and relatively flat hierarchies. A LOT of them don’t make any money, ever, either.
(I’ve long considered restaurants as a class to be a weird form of unintended charity. Restaurant-goers (hopefully) get to eat good food and servers and cooks and others get jobs. But a lot of restaurant owners get nothing (financially).)
All-else-equal, mazes are opposed by competition. But so is everything else. And perfect competition is such a bizarre situation that it will probably never literally hold, tho we may (in the far future) approach it asymptotically.
But mazes can survive any particular amount of competition strictly less than perfect even if we rightly expect them to be smaller and less severe in the face of more competition than otherwise.
Isolated demand for rigor, but yes I have.
There are no bullshit jobs in restaurants, there’s no ambiguity about what people should be doing, people’s employment status usually depends much more heavily on performance than in mazes, etc.
I agree with you here, but I think this isn’t an accident. Larger companies become more maze like, but mazes can’t survive competition, so companies under intense competition have to stay small to avoid becoming mazes.
How is that an isolated demand for rigor? I asked why (or how) you believed what you claimed and that seemed like pertinent info. I think you misinterpreted me as implying that you couldn’t have a good reason because you hadn’t worked at a restaurant before (and, further, also implying that if you had, you’d agree with me). I was really just curious why you believe what you claimed. I can’t imagine what history of me you consulted to conclude that my question to you was an isolated demand; care to share what that was?
Personally, I’ve worked at two restaurants, mostly delivering food at both. One was a pizza restaurant that also had on-site dining, i.e. had a sit-down full-service also. Another was just a delivery (or pickup) pizza restaurant. I’ve also worked at a ‘smoothie shop’, which is probably legally considered a restaurant or something similar, but is also not a prototypical ‘restaurant’.
These are really absolute statements! [Emphasis mine in some quotes of you below.]
“There are no bullshit jobs in restaurants” – that’s absolutely not true! Many restaurants have been killed because of someone with a bullshit job, e.g. an owner with a bullshit manager job. I would agree with ‘there are few or fewer bullshit jobs in restaurants compared to other businesses’, but I’m not even sure that it’s that true compared to similarly sized businesses.
“there’s no ambiguity about what people should be doing” – this is also absolutely not true! Any business, even successful restaurants, aren’t busy with ‘direct work’ at every single moment. What should people be doing during ‘down time’? Whatever the answer is, it wasn’t obvious to me – i.e. there IS ambiguity – every time that happened and various managers frequently asked me to perform wildly different tasks or projects. And even in ‘crunch time’ it’s not always obvious what people should be doing? At the smoothie shop at which I worked I would often have to decide something like ‘Should I continue taking orders or help filling orders or should I start washing some of the blender containers now instead?’. And sometimes I was the effective manager at the time, so I’d have to make a decision – resolve that particular ambiguity myself. And this – resolving or handling ambiguity – is exactly what a good manager in a restaurant or similar business does that’s so valuable.
“people’s employment status usually depends much more heavily on performance than in mazes” – you’re begging the question as you’re assuming restaurants aren’t mazes. Maybe you would be surprised that, in my experience, some people are retained (i.e. their “employment status” remains ‘employed’) long after their performance demonstrates that they should be let go. I’ve found smaller businesses to be less ruthless, generally, about firing people than larger businesses. I think your statement is also ambiguous because a person’s ‘performance’ – in a maze – is a very really thing even if it’s not object-level productivity. That’s a part of why they’re so toxic! They actively corrupt more objective measures of productivity and thus performance.
I don’t agree that mazes can’t survive competition. I think mazes are parasitic on { direct / object level } productivity. But, like biological parasites, the fact that the productive organization or living organism is under intense competition doesn’t out-right prohibit mazes or parasitism. And, because most competition is most intense between or among similar organizations or organisms (i.e. within an industry or niche or species), and because both mazes and parasites are generally contagious, we should expect similar organizations or organisms to have (roughly) similar levels of either.
‘Competition’ is also ambiguous. ‘Anti-competitive’ behavior is one one (very real) sense ‘cheating’, but in another (also very real) sense it’s just another move in the larger game, on another ‘level’. Mazes and parasites are also under (sometimes intense) competition, so we should expect a general ‘arms race’ between maze-runners and the productive portion of an organization and between parasites and ‘productive’ organisms. And maybe even ‘symbiosis’ is more like the ‘loser’ eking out some kind of advantage from what was formerly a purer parasite.
I think competition provides a relatively modest negative ‘pressure’ against mazes, but there’s no level of competition that prevents them from forming or actively destroys them. I think mazes are more often a chronic, and sometimes terminal, condition that afflicts any and every organization to a considerable degree.