The Michael Scott Theory of Social Class

I kind of disagree with the whole model, or at least as it pertains to large organizations.

I have spent too many unfortunate years at a big Enterprisey software development organization, and have concluded that the real sociopaths/incompetents/climbers lie in middle management. I would even go as far to say that if the middle management has no technical responsibilities, and as such entirely is detached from the work of engineers, nearly 100% of them come from the aforementioned categories.

Let me try to elaborate:

Upper management is generally characterised by a good awareness of market needs/conditions, what needs/can be delivered by the next release, and the available and required resources needed to deliver features on time. They have both the power to make significant decisions, and are usually held accountable for delivering features.

Non-technical management usually draws its ranks from MBAs who think of engineers as pathetic nerds, engineering people who either don't want to code or suck at it, and culty types who try to apply every hip development methodology/pop psychology hack to hopefully improve the performance of engineers (which is usually accompanied by universal resentment).

They usually have the luxury of playing head games with the people under them (I'm fairly convinced most pop management MBA bullshit exists to make their work and decision processes totally opaque/give them control to do whatever they want as well as to gaslight their 'subjects' about their perceived performance).

Since this is getting long I'll cherry pick 2 examples:

I spent 3 days (+overtime) debugging an issue that involved a bug in native code that created memory corruption in the Java side of the app, which naturally produced weird behaviour - I got berated for taking too long, as well as not writing a detailed enough post-bug report of the root cause of the issue (why was this even a thing).

Another time, some MM came up a great idea of improving software quality (which was shit due to the huge amounts of legacy code we weren't allowed to touch) - which essentially boiled down to filling out an extra field in Jira, making a compilation of said fields in a PowerPoint presentation, and having a 3 hour meeting about said fields, and based on the results, probably defining some extra wishy-washy action items to follow in the future. Naturally, this added an extra responsibility to our understaffed, overworked team, which was created a naturally hostile vibe in us. However one of the least competent, and morally flexible guys (the guy who literally couldn't solve a single problem on his own, but had a talent for making his problems somebody elses too - and advertise the result as 'teamwork') naturally stepped up to drive the idea - and was promoted to some management position a few months later, partially due to these efforts.

In summary, I feel like unlike upper management, and engineers, middle management serves no purpose in most organizations, and they know that, so they create their niche by mostly less then ethical purposes, so they get to play petty despots with some, but not much tangible power, and little to no responsibility/accountability.

I believe the function of this article, as evidenced by some comments in this thread, is to believably criticize media like the NYT or Twitter. If you take the authors world view as true, and you identify yourself as a laborer in the conservative notion, for instance maybe you like Donald trump or Jordan Peterson and hate critical theory, then you see the world clearly and you have friends in high places, unlike the clueless left academics and media who opposes you. The left, simply because they are in the middle, are universally wrong and mocked by everyone who isn’t as delusional as they are. I suspect this article and it’s author of having underlying (and deniable) partisan motivations.

It seems a lot of people are taking this sort of article more seriously than perhaps they should. To me it’s an interesting model to think about, regardless of its true validity; all models are faulty when they meet reality, after all. And I think with that it mind it’s interesting, and matches some of my own observations (loosely!)

I think Google really was more idealistic. With their 20% time, thinking new businesses would grow from it.

There was also Sun's business model, of free software (eg java) to sell hardware.

It's not that they were selfless... but their interests were aligned with others.

Of course, looking back, MS's open platform seems positively benign today, yet te were habitually vilified at the time... maybe today's corporations will seem similarly benign in hindsight? After all, you can't make money without some alignment with customers.

Or, maybe it's just "power corrupts".

Sorry, I meant 3-in-4 are female, not 1-in-4.

> A very confused sexism.

To an uncritical thinker, it might definitely seem that way.

To address the "liberal arts college" aspect, I mean specifically they're insulated from a lot of the reality of the rest of the world. I specifically mean the Dartmouths, Browns, etc. of the educational world.

I mean people for whom a $200,000 education to have a $35,000 - $115,000 a year job is perfectly reasonable, because after all, they're not the ones paying for it in any capacity. Their family can easily foot the bill, and if they can't, then they end up married to a junior IB / exec type who can easily afford to pay back that pesky student loan.

Obviously this skews more female because of evolutionary dynamics, but you still probably get the occasional male for whom this might be an option of some kind.

So what are the implications of a majority female, thoroughly middle class-to-upper middle class group who attended the same or similar small liberals arts colleges?

Homogeneity. Women are statistically more willing to conform to the group, or rather, they're higher in trait agreeableness if you want to hash it out scientifically. This means a reluctance to champion a book that could cause controversy, much less intense controversy. We're seeing this already with Penguin having to deal with employees demanding that Jordan Peterson's new book not be published.

The second layer of homogeneity is that in order to do well at those colleges - to even be accepted beyond being the 'token' of your specific sub-divided little group - is that you need to speak a certain way, act a certain way, and think a certain way. That gets reinforced and becomes self-selecting. The location of the major publishing houses are all large cosmopolitan cities, cities where the concerns are, "Do I seem culturally accepting enough?", "Am I projecting the 'correct' values?", etc.

You need not take my word for it though. You can find plenty of authors who complain about these sorts of things.

EDIT: I should add... I know these people. I occasionally work with and consult for these people. The certainty of their positions relative to their utter lack of worldly experience is not just staggering, but offensive.

I've travelled all over the world, for over 19 years. I've been to 72 countries, I've lived in 12 different nations for over a year at a time. Women and men with the kind of credentials I've mentioned above are almost always the same. They're utterly convinced of their own moral superiority, whilst also being utterly ignorant of anything outside of their little bubbles.