pvdoom

> you don't have the power to set rules, or lock people in boxes, or (in some places) kill people

Quite the opposite - companies literally set rules all the time. How the work should be done, who should do what, who the boss is, when are you allowed to leave, etc.

Being obliged to be in an office is tantamount to being locked in a box for a considerable amount of your time - and you don't get to choose which part, so you end up spending the vast majority of your precious time locked in a box working for someone, because otherwise, and here we come to the last part:

Companies have the power to ruin livelihoods, cause homelessness and death, etc.

The government of capitalist countries creates that system, and has done so historically, so that the system above is upheld. And the government works mostly in favour of businesses and business owners as a whole, because it is made of said people. You are obliged to go to work for someone else or face starvation, exactly because this is a choice that was made and continues to be made by governments in favour of businesses. You are obliged to pay exorbitant amount of money to afford basic necessities. etc. etc.

> but that doesn't mean money is power. Money is money.

Exactly the opposite - money is pure power. Money is literally congealed social relationships. With little money you can't do much. With a lot of money, you go golfing with senators and lawmakers like I go for Friday beers with my mates. With a little money you're forced to continue working that deadend job to make ends meet. With a lot of money you can have a yacht bigger than the house of the person in the previous sentence (oh, wait, that person doesn't actually own the house)

> Person who knows how to truly destroy git history

The Gitsatz Haderach

> what capitalism wants to avoid is putting "money" in with "power"

Sorry but this is plain out wrong. Under a capitalist system money IS power, as it is fundamental for survival, and that people with money are the ones that tend to have disproportionate amount of leverage both over the government and individuals. Under capitalism the government mostly exists to protect the interests of businesses and property holders, a lot more than say the common person on the street.

Just wanted to point out that the distinction between communism and socialism is not whether it's the state that owns things. In fact there is no distinction. They are one and the same and both refer to workers owning the means of production.

There are different types of communism, based on what that means. i.e. Leninists would generally believe that the state is representative of the people, via dictatorship of the proletariat and all that. Whereas council communists would have none of that and would prefer no state and councils of producers and consumers, and once you start digging into anarchism, you will find a bunch more other varieties of communism.

> Anyone else see an issue with this comment? We don’t know how to value the work of a corporate employee but we’re simultaneously all being paid less than we’re worth.

Think of it as a general rule of thumb, a statistical average. You will for example find that often managers and executives make a crazy amount of money, but are all but useless, but are only a small part of the bigger company.

While I see where you are coming from, I don't think the free market has much to do with it, as "free market" to the extend that such thing exists outside the fantasies of ancap weirdos, is just one of many types of distributed decision making systems, and as such shares a lot of traits with them.

So it's a question of organising big systems and how best to do that. Nothing says that we can't have organisations structured around this decentralised decision making, and quite the opposite - we both have the evidence this works, and it has been so thoroughly studied there are tons upon tons of pages written going back all the way to the 20s ...

Its always the management consultants and finance guys that ruin things ...

> Not waste time by ceding control to another entity that doesn't have any engineering know-how to evaluate what does and does not need done. Take the reins and do what needs doing.

Problem is organisational power. What happens when the "another entity" is the one that has the decision making power and is the one that can use that power to pressure you what to do and what not to do?

Asking cause this was my life for a while, and its an endless and gruelling battle of persuading, educating, trying to make someone understand things they don't want to understand ...

> Product should have nothing to do with refactors on the systems.

Which really sucks when product is the one that gets the say on what gets worked on ...

IDK, I recently did a big presentation on the topic in my company's Python community and there were tons of people that were genuinely surprised it's not great. And people in my department love throwing random classes that inherit from everything in the universe for no reason at all... for python. Like not even Java or C#. And coming in as the lone new-comer its not going to be easy to convince everyone that has been there for years that the common sense aint great.

> I might be fully past the idea that what makes the difference is the architecture rather than the team.

SO much yes. You may have the prettiest architecture, and the best separation of concerns, and the most modular modularity, but if you don't have the right competencies, processes and people all that would go out the window before you can even finish the power point slides showing off your nice new architecture.

It's like a garden - if you don't tend to it, it turns into a mess, and the fight against entropy never stops. If you also have to fight the team along the way you've already lost

This. Conways law is about the actual organization, not the orgchart.

Its not really the move overseas itself that reduce in quality, its the conscious choice to both use cheaper materials and provide less training to that cheaper labor.

The kids are alright

IN the 60s and 70s there were ideas of using actual ponds as computers

I think it's not so much the individual management technique that is the problem, it's the design of our organisations. SAFe, Lean, etc. are half processes and half organization design, but are generally really shoddy on the second part, and mostly shoddy on the first part.

Team topologies as a way to design your organization is a good start, TPS for processes, but with really taking to heart the kaizen and autonomation parts. And things that maximise autonomy and facilitate communication.

Yeah, executives need to understand how little influence they actually have. I think OKRs aren't really that much of a solution, as more of a stopgap. We need a new management paradigm that embraces this knowledge, rather than pretending it doesn't exist.

Hell yeah! And on top of that management rarely learns or understands that they need to think and design what their organization should be, nor that their power to introduce change is much more limited than they think.

I think people very often don't know what they want, and at least for data science there is this weird thinking that exists that you are either a data scientist or a developer. When in reality the good data scientists also have good dev skills.

no

Hell, most enterprises don't even follow SAFe, but usually an even worse abomination wearing the skin of SAFe. And that is not defending it in any way it's cursed.

> But private logging operations have long understood that they need to split up land to have forest at different stages so that they can continually harvest wood for a long time.

Private logging operations have started taking a more sustainable view only after a lot of pressure from conservationist groups. And even today, private logging operations are destroying incredibly important forests. Private logging is a good example of why privatisation is so extremely bad about the commons and the environment.

> communication, monitoring and enforcement. > Which is a roundabout way of saying government. Privatised, for profit ownership encourages unsustainable exploitation, without much regard for the longer term consequences. Again - forestry is a good example, and so are fisheries. Likewise:

> Privatization (as in splitting up the resources into various parts) can align the intensives correctly, the damage the resource takes impact your own utility and thus aligns intensives correctly.

Again is a roundabout way of saying government. And instead of adding for-profit middle-men here, we can just skip that part and just govern the resources. Then you don't need to deal with a fiddly system of incentives, that will most likely be made weaker by lobbyists representing private interests.

> Now one can make the argument if the privatization happened in a fair way. Meaning did all the people who had access to common land get a fair share. That however is a different question.

Intimately connected to the topic however, since historically, privatisation has always been used in order to enrich the already wealthy. So it is important, because this is the cause for privatisation, and therefore there will be a lot of propaganda and justification on why it needs to happen - which is what we see historically as well.

I was involved with historical reenactment, of the medieval kind, and have interacted with those of the later era. So, there is a lot of research that is going on, and a lot of it involves both artefacts and visual evidence ... and if we look at these, we may get a very weird picture of modern warfare. Operator, shades, action heroes, promotional materials. And most of all - propaganda and depolitization are all forces in our media, that distort the picture.

Yup.

And a lot of those things you list are not tragedy of the commons as stated, but a consequences of the very thing that Hardin was defending - the enclosure of the commons and privatisation. Because privatisation and capitalism both encourage competition, and unsustainable behaviour towards common resources. This is why we see agricultural and industrial runoffs, oceanic stock depletion etc. Historical communities tend to have tools and practices that prevent all of that stuff from happening, practices that have been put aside with colonialism, enclosure and markets ...

> I would suggest Elinor Ostrom work on the topic.

Isn't her fundamental restatement of the tragedy of the commons that if the people decide to cooperate, then it doesn't happen? Which is a pretty thorough refutation to the original tragedy of the commons, as we see it in the Econ 101 meme. Problem is that privatisation (together with markets, cause the two always go hand in hand) introduces incentives to compete and to exploit, which achieves ... well a tragedy of the commons. And the second problem is that historically, privatisation has pretty much always been done in an unfair way.

The whole tragedy of the commons was literally made up by a very reactionary dude to justify fucking people over and justify enclosure and privatisation. Historically people have actually had rather complicated and at the same time very effective ways of sustainably managing the commons. It also happens that privatisation is the thing that makes the tragedy of the commons happen.

A better way to put it is, we could fix everything, we just don't, because it is not profitable and not in the interest of the people that have the money to invest in stuff.

I do think there is definitely an element of things being harder than they seem, but it's just an element. The vast majority is the for profit nature of our system, that does not reward making things better.

Kinda disagree. All the times I have seen OKRs implemented has been as part of a "transition to agile" with several other measures, and often what happens is they get slapped on top or replace other measures, without doing anything real for fixing company bureaucracy. You need much more fundamental changes to fix that, and that would involve pissing off a lot of people with a lot of power.

To me its not OKRs specifically but organisations in general - what is an organisation and how does it actually work (as opposed to what we tell ourselves), and that includes the frameworks and processes we use. OKRs are interesting then because they are a specific framework that maybe, or maybe not works. But people getting obsessed about OKRs in particular and making them "fun" are completely missing the bigger picture and the purpose of metrics, as tools of control and stuff...