Comment by jmyeet

A lot of work is fake work. It's just social signaling. It's just a game of being liked. Just look at the stats for autistic people who have difficulty finding and maintaining employment, not because they're bad at their actual job but because neurotypical people just don't like them. Anyone who has worked for a remotely large organization has met plenty of people who have been promoted well beyond their actual abilities or output.

In this space you'll often hear about Dunbar's number [1] and the idea that organizations with more than about 150 people tend to break down. In larger organizations, a whole layer of middle management seems to rise up with questionable output. Like you might have no idea who your VP is. One place I worked had the VP visit once a quarter, walk aroudn and ask what people worked on and occasionally yell at them.

The military is an interesting example because it's millions of people, often in confined spaces so a whole bunch of rules have to be created so they don't kill each other, basically. And if you talk to any current or former servicemembers you'll hear stories about how not much gets done there either. Toxic leadership, lots of waiting around for nothing, bureaucracy and so on.

One can view this "research" as "be nice to your employees" but I think it's more nefarious than that. Or at least "be nice" won't be the lesson Corporate America takes from it. Instead it'll be that employees need to be even more closely monitored so they're not slacking off.

I think about what I call "organizational churn". This is where every 6 months you'll get an email saying a VP in your direct chain whom you've likely never met now reports to a different SVP under some restructure or reorganization to "align goals" or for "efficiency".

What you realize after awhile is that organizational churn only exists so nobody is every accountable for their actions or output. They're never in the same place long enough to see the consequences of their action or inaction.

But what I've thought about a lot recently in terms of organization is the Chinese Community Party. Millions of people work for the CCP. Yet it's output has been stunning. Some 40,000km of high speed train lines in 20 years for less than the US spends on the military in one year. Energy projects, metros, bridges, cities, housing, roads, ports, the list goes on.

How does the CCP avoid empire-building, institutional rot and general bureaucratic paralysis?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number