> But, isn’t it our job to impress upon the managers the importance, in a certain regard?
I think it is. But this appears to be an unpopular opinion and I'm not sure why. The question I'm still unsure about is if managers realize they are surrounding themselves with "yes men". The other question I'm still unsure about is if people realizing that not saying "no" (or "yes, but") is not meaningfully different from being a "yes man".
Our job is to engineer. Our job is to build (good) products. Information can't just flow top down, it has to go the other way too.
What seems weird to me is that during "the good times" in our field, that happened more frequently. A strong employee market (as opposed to an /employeer/ market) seemed to be good for employee, employeer, and the people buying everything. But myopia is quick to set in.
> Alternatively, what about just doing the right thing?
That's the main motivation of why I speak up. There are consequences to our actions. Our choices may have small or little influence, but unfortunately the problem is that the world is complicated. The problems we face are mainly composed of many small issues that add up. I am surprised this is more contentious in places like HN as we deal with this every day. The way we solve big problems is we break them down into many different small and manageable problems. The only difference here is that we're viewing things bottom up rather than explicitly breaking them down. Though that is harder to figure out
which small problems add up to the big problem. But we deal with this type of problem solving in programming all the time too.
If you haven't heard it before, allow me to introduce you to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy[0]. I think one of the important things it states is that the second group is actually bad for business. I think there's a common misconception. People are often saying "well it is good for business", pointing to all kinds of messed up shit. I don't buy that. It is myopically good for business, but not in any meaningful length of time. Though then again, as Buffet says "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." Michael Burry famous learned this first hand.
[0] https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
In any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
- First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
- Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.