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0 pointswpietri2mo ago0 comments

Humans are primates, and primate dominance dynamics are going to be the default absent some conscious choice otherwise. Our whole executive/worker dichotomy is a descendant of the British class system. (E.g., note that airlines specifically have a "business class".) And MBA-driven business culture is focused on short-term managerial interest, not societal value or long-term business success.

I think all of those tendencies come to the fore at any organization that doesn't have either a strong sense of mission or a sufficiently desperate need for success that they pay attention to material reality rather than social reality. With a possible partial exception for things like co-ops and other places where the culture is fundamentally different enough. E.g., Mondragon, or Zingerman's.

I think Google, back in its don't be evil/organize the world's information era, probably qualified. They started with a very strong mission-driven culture rooted in academics and engineering. It took a fair bit of time for MBA dogmas to make it like most other places. But from everything I hear, what once felt almost like a calling now is just another job.

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Quarrelsome2mo ago

> MBA-driven business culture is focused on short-term managerial interest, not societal value or long-term business success.

This is a common refrain I also believe in and there's an interesting open question that comes up here about whether or not an engineering department should or shouldn't execute an order that intentionally destroys the product for short term gain.

wpietriOP2mo ago

Agreed. To me that's related to the question of minions vs professionals.

If I go to a doctor and say, "Hey, please prescribe me a lot of morphine," the answer will be some version of "hell no". That's because doctors, even if you pay for the visit, have responsibilities to the patient, the profession, and society at large. Responsibilities that should not be overridden by money or power.

The same is true for actual engineers, like the ones that build bridges. But although we often call ourselves engineers, a lot of us don't act like it. We're often more like the minions in a supervillain's volcano lair: whatever the boss says, we do.

We could be different, though. There's the ACM code of ethics, for example: https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics

Or the IEEE-CS code of ethics specifically for software: https://www.computer.org/education/code-of-ethics

We could, as a profession, agree to follow those. We could build an organization that supports people who do the right thing in the face of managerial pressure. We could censure those who don't. I'd love to see it happen, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

johnnyanmac2mo ago

>The same is true for actual engineers, like the ones that build bridges. But although we often call ourselves engineers, a lot of us don't act like it.

Because software is the wild west. Maybe there's some exceptions in medical tech, but there's no license at risk nor ethics assossiation to be ousted from (nor to vouch for us) if one day we receive something like: "hey, we need you to triangulate and calculate the parameters needed to bomb this children's hospital. Get to it".

Either we do it and go along with our day. Or we don't and get moved or fired.

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