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Comment by blagie | Hacker News Reader

You can blame one middle manager.

You can't blame a million middle managers. If all middle managers are doing something wrong, that's a problem of org design.

The same is true across the board. One corrupt congressman? Bad apple. 100 of them in a government? Something is wrong with the way the system is set up. One bad teacher? Bad apple. Most teachers are bad? You're looking at some issue with hiring practices, training, salary, incentives, management, accountability, transparency, administration, or something else.

These problems get hard to solve when blame is misplaced. You can't fix an org structure if you can't talk about teachers doing bad things since people confound that with bad teachers. The exact same person can be the most and the least competent based on the situation they're in.

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the original saying about bad apples is that one spoils the barrel, which applies in some organizational cases.

Sure you can't blame a million middle managers, because they are all in different barrels, but congress people are in the same barrel, and if one is corrupt we might assume that non-corrupt ones will be corrupted over time by exposure.

Many systems can be set up to ease spoiling, thus creating a two-tiered problem, when the teachers are all bad because the system promotes bad teachers you can't fix it just by fixing the system because you have a crop of teachers in their barrels waiting to rot any newcomer and also rising to positions where they can put regulations in place to ease rottenness in the future.

I think we're talking about a difference in timescales. My experience is that culture naturally converges to incentives, but very slowly.

If we were to evaluate teachers in ways which didn't align to tests (or not at all), put in mechanisms to fire bad teachers, added transparency and accountability (so parents know what's going wrong and can try to advocate to fix it), etc. we would have a whole new teaching culture... circa 2044.

A faster reboot is possible, but with more disruption (e.g. wholesale firing). Disruption is harmful in several ways, from impacting morale and stability (making it more difficult to bring in qualified people), to having experienced people leave, to simply taking time to learn how to work in the new order. Whether a disruption is warranted depends on the level of organizational dysfunction.

The current set of dysfunctions in schools specifically are grounded in a narrow tests which were implemented in 2002. Schools have increasingly broken, as anything not in Common Core was increasingly ignored, and schools competed on the only measure they were evaluated on.

Of course in the human society there are no things that are simple single step problems. There is a problem and someone/something was causing it directly, but that cause usually had a cause of its own, and again and again, in a chain, branching indefinitely. So yeah, the cause of that manager making bad decision is his bad education and bad hiring decision by an upper tier, and the cause of his bad education was a bad teacher or mentor, and the cause of that was a bad education and bad hiring of the upper tier, and so on and so on. Indefinitely.

All it takes is inventories of carts periodically done, and you’ve created the incentive to never take a cart out of service, because now there is paperwork involved.

If instead you can order a few new carts “when you feel low” there’s nothing preventing someone at the store putting the annoying dead cart into the dumpster.

Never underestimate the friction paperwork causes.

When almost everything is broken the organizational problem is in society.

Capitalism and democracy are the worst forms of economic and political management, except for all the others we've tried.

(Footnote: I still think there may be better ones out there worth trying. But I much prefer this to warlords roving the land, or being a serf in a fiefdom)

Yeah, the issue is capitalism. It requires costs be minimized and profits go up. Why buy quality carts? Why pay employees good wages? Simple: you don't because every other business is doing the same thing.

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