I have worked for a company where the ethos among the workers was very high, but management was exceptionally incompetent at managing. Zero people skills, and deeply skeptical that people skills were even necessary. (Many companies founded by hackers are like this.) So the CEO and CTO asked people to do things, but did no process management at all and just waited for them to be done.
This worked a lot better than you would think. We had hired people who believed in our mission, and mostly people do want to do what's asked of them. Our codebase was pretty lean, even boring, because there was no incentive to do any promo packet type spectacular development.
Projects sometimes took a long time, but they did get done.
But this stops working when you have projects that require coordination between people with differing incentives. Teams grow tired of waiting for the other team to do their half, so mistrust begins to become endemic. In the vacuum, all your hacker ICs grow fatigued and start doing more "interesting" things just to amuse themselves, because, who's really watching them?
TLDR benign neglect, even under ideal conditions, will eventually be a problem. The company's progress becomes slower and slower, and may even start sliding backwards according to some metrics.
This is a great comment! I only hope to add color, not to dispute any of it.
In my experience software shops that find product/market fit exceptionally early can not only tolerate benign neglect, but are best served by it while that market is still contended.
Capitalism works amazingly well when the referees just Godzilla stomp on cronyism and nepotism and monopoly and other market failures: the sharpest people want to work places that are in the fight and give everyone a stake in the outcome: such people in such settings are largely self-organizing on the basis of mutual respect and esprit des corps. A clear and serious competitor or competitors rapidly weed out ceremony and careerism while strengthening ruthless meritocracy (which is incidentally good for inclusiveness: no shortage of ethnic minorities in pro ball).
The tricky thing is keeping the incentives aligned as markets mature and the rot of capture sets in. All of today’s high-profile behemoths lobby extensively and employ former McKinsey people in policy level roles (Google is run by one).
Unfortunately it’s not as simple as throwing out the careerist middle managers or domain-soft executives when the scale exceeds “hacker culture”, you need executives that use their organization-fu to hold the rent seekers in check, and that is a rare breed.
Sure. Thanks for the color, but let me add some shape.
Perhaps you saw some confirmation of "ruthless meritocracy" in my post. You could not be more wrong. Most people in the organization I am describing would have been rejected as undistinguished weirdo losers from flyover towns. Our strength was that we supported each other.
I personally do not think that market discipline or financial incentives have much to do with producing excellence. At best, those systems can notice, after the fact, that something wonderful has occurred, and that it might be worth bringing to a larger group of people.
I still think we might be in violent agreement. The current sad state of our industry is IMHO mostly a result of the rejection of undistinguished weirdo losers from nowhere. I’m an undistinguished weirdo loser from nowhere, and I vividly remember the days when no one ran a background check on your politics or friends or habits at the weekend or aspy ticks or anything but “can this person code”.
I used the terms mutual respect and esprit des corps and you use the term supported one another: I think we’re talking about the same thing.
The prevailing wisdom, then as (ostensibly) now, was to judge people by their demonstrated achievements, your assessment of their ability, and what other hackers think in that order.
Today that’s a weird loyalty test (Carmack and Luckey will tell you all about it).
I agree with what I think you’re saying: good hackers are generally highly motivated by money until the point they get to work on cool things they believe in, and pretty bored/unmoved by it beyond that point: excellence is about pride in the craftsmanship and quality of our work.
I have worked for a company where the ethos among the workers was very high, but management was exceptionally incompetent at managing. Zero people skills, and deeply skeptical that people skills were even necessary. (Many companies founded by hackers are like this.) So the CEO and CTO asked people to do things, but did no process management at all and just waited for them to be done.
This worked a lot better than you would think. We had hired people who believed in our mission, and mostly people do want to do what's asked of them. Our codebase was pretty lean, even boring, because there was no incentive to do any promo packet type spectacular development.
Projects sometimes took a long time, but they did get done.
But this stops working when you have projects that require coordination between people with differing incentives. Teams grow tired of waiting for the other team to do their half, so mistrust begins to become endemic. In the vacuum, all your hacker ICs grow fatigued and start doing more "interesting" things just to amuse themselves, because, who's really watching them?
TLDR benign neglect, even under ideal conditions, will eventually be a problem. The company's progress becomes slower and slower, and may even start sliding backwards according to some metrics.