The problem is that you can't run a large engineering department based on "Bob says Steve isn't that good". It just doesn't scale, that's the whole reason metrics get introduced.
This is such a defeatist attitude. We're arguing two different things too.
We're not saying you have to personally know 500k people. We're saying that to some people, it's very clear and obvious that someone working for them is incompetent and/or simply doing a bad job (and this is not gut feel). This shouldn't be up for debate or controversy. If you hired that person to manage another person, you expect them to know what they're doing and at the very least see the Red Flags of incompetence (whatever they may be). We've been trying the "systemic" way of ridding ourselves of bias, but here it is, alive and well. What we got instead is a broken system that's full of conflicting priorities and people trying their best to navigate them and doing so badly - all whilst the actual goals and priorities get sidelined as secondary.
If you have a manager overseeing 4 people, and a higher level manager overseeing 4 managers, it takes 10 levels of management to oversea 500k people. That is not particularly daunting.
Fair point - but we've seen how metrics can be gamed and cease to be useful measures of reality. People are smart and they will game them, even if it means hiding it behind a score/checklist/report.
We can either choose excellence and competence, or we get this weird mediocrity that is killing us slowly but somehow we can say "but it's running our large department based on science and scalable metrics".
Maybe we're not supposed to make these departments scale, maybe we need to keep them small and autonomous and "unfair" to some degree in order to function. Have we considered that? Not everything has to be optimized to the N-th degree and made to grow large like an instagram or google.
There's a great scene at the end of Generation Kill where the war reporter asks the commander why he didn't reprimand one of the worst leaders underneath him more harshly.
The commander essentially says that he constantly receives conflicting reports about his leaders' performance, and if he relieved one for unproven reports, his command would disintegrate. Because the good leaders have equal numbers of bad reports about them, from those who don't like them.
Summed up the proper exercise of authority nicely, imho.
That's one answer. Although manager technical expertise has to also come with minimal ego, so you can defer to your people when they know more than you.
The alternative is developing an intuition for bullshit. It's rarer, but I've had a few non-technical PMs / managers who were excellent at their job because they could suss out whether someone wasn't being honest.
Everything has to come with minimal ego. I don't see how that has anything to do with managers having technical knowledge.
And it's great if a handful of people can smell out bs in a field they're not familiar with, but you can't write policy on the back of a few unicorns like that. (Yes, managing ego is hard too, but I believe it's more common to start with and more trainable.)
There is this scene in Das Boot were one of the crew members says that they are going deeper than the sub is rated for and the captain says "don't worry German engineering".
But right now we know neither (Bob or Steve being bad), and we hide that behind some objective metric that gets diluted at every level. We hide it in Steve's reviews, in Bob's reviews, in the post-weld reports, in the weld-quality audit report, the inspection. Heck even NASA oversight inspectors are probably downplaying some of the severity when stating it in their findings report (saying it's partially due to, or the welds "contributed" to the quality, etc.) instead of just saying "these guys got an amateur to weld the exterior". So this "Steve is Bad" property gets spread out across all those various things, when we could just as easily have fired Steve because Bob evaluated him. Or maybe Bob didn't state it, maybe the NASA inspector told him "Bob, whoever you got to weld this thing is an amateur. Fire him before you get someone killed."
And sure, does that mean Bob might get it wrong? Of course, he might even be a petty little tyrant with an ego or he just might not like Steve because he made a funny comment about Bob's tie on his first day. I don't think some things can scale and be optimized away like we're all a bunch of cogs in a machine with our own individual little tasks and performance metrics that get aggregated into the larger whole.
Good luck fighting it. The basic human desire to stay out of the line of fire, combined with feudal loyalty trees, lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union despite the great intelligence and administrative ability of the people at the top. The only economic difference between the state monopoly of the USSR and the many companies of the US is that here, it's legal to start new organizations, where in the USSR that would be prosecuted as anti-party activity. The "I have a family to feed" effect worked exactly the same way over there.
Reading about the history of socialism is eye-opening, specifically the period where it turned into a giant bureaucratic corporation that nobody was allowed to leave. That period started even before the mass murder toned down into "repression," so strong was the desire of individual managers to make it impossible to blame them for shortfalls relative to unrealizable plans.
For all that's been said about how different the east and west are, their fatal economic problems were nothing more alien than politics plus monopoly.
Private ownership isn't anti-monopoly, though. Big fuck-off monopolies are the best way to deliver rents to shareholders, which is capitalism's objective function, so ownership and management pursue the goal with a single mind and eventually they succeed. Eventually they find a combination of vertical/horizontal integration, economies of scale, network effects, platform effects, last mile dynamics, regulatory capture, and ownership rights that lock out competition. It's all they talk about, it's all they think about, and if you try to deliver a pitch to an investor without some kind of plan to build an anticompetitive moat god help you, lol.
I'll believe that capitalists believe in competition when they start passing policy that promotes it. Policy that tax disadvantages large corporations to encourage them to break up. Policy that winds down the "cheat codes" that business students and boardrooms salivate over. Policy that prevents political influence from becoming just another route to investment return. Policy that makes it easier to do incorporation/payroll/taxes/benefits for small businesses. Until these things happen, I see capitalism as just one more flavor of the same old empire-building dynamics that stretch back through time.
And not necessarily the winning one. Selling the industrial base of the United States economy to the Communist Party of China in order to pump the assets of wealthy Americans was a real six dimensional chess move. I suppose we'll see how it turns out.
I didn't actually mention private ownership, only what might be called the right of free assembly.
Also, for what it is worth, individual players in the market obviously want to become literal kings. They're "capitalists" but not "capitalist ideologists." Capitalist ideologists are people like Milton Friedman, who was not a fan of monopoly and who was himself not much of a businessman.
So they aren't true capitalists? Why does that sound familiar?
My contention with the likes of Milton Friedman isn't that he enjoyed monopolies, it's that his policies (and those of capitalists by any definition I have heard put on the field) tend to support and encourage the formation of monopolies. Markets are full of natural anti-competitive forces (again, just ask any investor about moats) and if you don't have a plan to stomp them out, markets just devolve back into the world's 500th mechanism for the people on top to extract rents from the people on the bottom. As a side effect, the monopolies grow into the same bureaucratic monstrosities they claim to be the cure for.
Boeing is a government-dependent monopoly, and Friedman argued convincingly that pretty much all long-lasting monopolies were too. They achieve regulatory capture and that's that for competition.
Also, it was true both times you heard it. Brezhnev had no intention of "building communism." :-)
There's no cure though. You can't fix organizations infested with politicians. They're too entrenched. They have an advantage: you, rare competent person, have to focus on both the engineering and the organizational dynamics, whereas these creatures, since they don't believe in world of atoms outcomes, can spend 100% of their time on schemes and on getting rid of gadfly types like you.
Progress depends on creative destruction, not internal reform. The only way we maintain or advance quality as a society is to enable the continual creation of new institutions to compete with sclerotic and terminally politician-infested ones.
When you artificially prop up the latter, you curtail progress overall.
So, would you prefer the space division of Boeing to crash and burn, and be replaced with something else entirely? Where would it come from? What to do with other important Boeing space contracts, like, say, X-37?
