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Related to the concept of efficiency / slack is the concept of a Moral Maze (from Robert Jackall) [1] or Immoral Maze (the same thing but renamed for clarity) [2].

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0199729883

[2] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zpA2Tnp2k38qSmr8J/how-to-ide...

⬐ disgruntledphd2

I'm not sure how Moral Mazes relates to this topic, can you explain the links to me a little bit more?

⬐ andrewla

One aspect of a Moral Maze is that it systematically removes slack:

> A world without slack is not a place one wants to be. Mazes systematically erase all slack. Slack is evidence of not being fully committed, and given that everyone’s skills are equal and competition is perfect, holding anything back means losing even if undetected. [1]

And an article by Zvi on the specific concept [2].

My take, and my experience, says that a lot of what makes a moral maze is an organization where professional managers engage in a large-scale effort to ensure that blame or negative consequences flow past them. So you advance by building a maze around yourself so that negative results miss you and you grab credit for positive results that have to flow through you.

When people "on the line" do good work, you can leech off of that. And as long as your organization does good work you can do fine. But if your organization becomes marginal or if you're trying to outcompete other middle managers, you have to find a way to pass that downstream. As a generic "manager" you can't add value on the line, but it's very easy to blame lack of results on lack of efficiency (too much slack) so that's what gets sacrificed.

[1] https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/01/12/how-to-identify-an-i...

[2] https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/09/30/slack/

I googled "SOC 2 Audited" - and I've got: """ A SOC 2 audit is a company-wide certification that evaluates an organization's standards regarding its core data security infrastructure, information handling practices, consumer privacy, and confidentiality. For this purpose, an SOC 2 auditor needs to evaluate various aspects of a company's systems and processes """ So it is about security. I guess your point is that it is just a security theatre and not related to the real thing - but that is a different discussion. It would be a discussion about https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ and https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Mazes-World-Corporate-Managers/... and etc

If anyone is interested in how organizations function (or not as the case may be), I highly recommend the book "Moral Mazes" by Robert Jackall: https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Mazes-World-Corporate-Managers/...

⬐ peter_d_sherman

Excerpt:

This classic study of ethics in business presents an eye-opening account of how corporate managers think the world works, and how big organizations shape moral consciousness.

Robert Jackall takes the reader inside a topsy-turvy world where

hard work does not necessarily lead to success, but

sharp talk, self-promotion, powerful patrons, and sheer luck might.

What sort of everyday rules-in-use do people play by when there are no fixed standards to explain why some succeed and others fail? In the words of one corporate manager, those rules boil down to this maxim:

"What is right in the corporation is what the guy above you wants from you. That's what morality is in the corporation."

I didn't mean to call you a liar. You might believe you are screening for and prioritizing productivity. I'm saying that I don't believe that's actually what the hiring process you're a part of is screening for, even if the people who comprise that process believe it. Obviously, this is just my prior opinion, a default, since I don't have special evidence.

Regarding your comment, the most major issue is with that term "lean." In many cases, this means some usage of Agile/Scrum nonsense, which if true completely throws out any credibility that the position is focused on productivity in the least bit. Sometimes instead of Agile, "lean" is used for six-sigma like micromanagerial process, which suffer all the same criticisms as Agile.

Even in the best case, a team that self-identifies as "lean" is failing to make use of specialization of labor. Many of these teams hire people into roles titled "full-stack" or "generalist" and they say stupid shit like, "because our team is lean, you will have to wear many hats." (I am actually so sick of hearing the phrase "wear many hats" that it causes me to instantly reject a job out of hand at this point).

"Full stack" is arguably the single worst trend in all of software. It goes completely against the major benefits of software development: specialization and separation of concerns. Many organizations that use full-stack practices also believe that they don't need to provide meaningful job descriptions. They want to leave job descriptions vague ("many hats!!") and argue that candidates have to be adaptable if they want to cut it in this crazy dynamic world of ours.

This is all total bullshit. There might be a small period of time in a start-up life cycle when it pays to have many generalists and leave everyone's work assignments vague. But most start-ups, and certainly most established companies, have no business operating in "lean" mode. You need to empower employees to know the limits of their job descriptions, so that they won't be treated as catch-all, pan-everything work receptables who are capped solely by the literal limits of their physical exhaustion (at which point you whip together another pan-everything job ad to hire yet another generalist to handle the undifferentiated work overflow).

This fails to respect the worker's speciality (which is something the worker absolutely had to protect to advance in their career). It also means the company is not extracting the full value from the worker that they could by doing the challenging job of actually managing them and setting up the workflows so that work requiring that specialist skill is routed to the right worker. If the company embraces a "full-stack" "we're lean so everyone wears many hats" attitude, it's an overt admission that the company couldn't give two shits about what you're actually capable of doing for them, and instead only cares that you do what they happen to tell you to do right now, even if it's hilariously underutilizing you or is hilariously inappropriate for someone with your particular skills, or is using in a way that fails to address critical business needs you've identified.

Basically, I see "lean" and I immediately think, "managers believe they can throw a bunch of so-called full-stack developers on a Scrum team and then flip on autopilot." The managers are going to get mad if that machine learning expert they assigned to clean up the legacy Rails codebase ever breathes a word of dissatisfaction over not being fully utilized or utilized in their speciality.

"lean" is by far the buzzword that is most negative from your comment, but I also see the phrase "move the ball forward" and I immediately picture those trite motivational posters with eagles and someone passing a baton in a relay race and I just roll my eyes. We're not in middle school. We go to work to do work. We can speak about the work we do in grown up terms. Not "moving the ball forward." To me, this communicates a very top-down attitude about what progress means. There are some high-level, likely paternalistic or even misogynistic, ideals about company progress and what a good little worker must do to be productive. No thank you! Even if this language is not indicative of the worst kinds of problems, it still is extremely infantilizing.

"A single unproductive developer ..." oh boy, don't even get me started. Right away this sounds like someone with a way over-inflated opinion of the work their team does. "Our work is so very important that we can't abide even a single person who isn't amazingly productive." Yeah, OK. For one, you just said your team is lean, so whose fault is it that you don't have adequate redundancy built into your technical resources (your tech staff). If someone said their distributed database "couldn't tolerate even a single node failure" you'd ask them why they don't create more nodes and add redundancy to have a safety factor.

Why would a team agree to be lean if they are also worried that a single bad link in the chain will cause a problem. Either there's some kind of extreme budget constraint, or else this is someone who just read a Malcolm Gladwell-like pop book about "lean" and "Agile" and decided that's the shiny new management thing they just had to have.

Lastly, I'm not sure why "release date of a feature" was the example you chose to go with. This could be innocuous, but more often than not when I see people who think in terms of release dates and features, it's a huge red flag. Most teams need to actively constrain the set of features they agree to support, tell customers and internal business stakeholders "no" way, way more often, and address overall technical debt and architectural quality concerns far more than shipping features. If I was in an early interview stage and someone is already asking me how I make sure I always cram out all the features on time, that's a huge red flag of a dysfunctional process driven more by short-term business managers seeking bonuses that are tied to on-paper accomplishments (e.g. we shipped X,Y and Z) than the engineering reality (X, Y, and Z were technically delivered 'on time' but they suck and now everyone's asking for W which we can't even do because of how fragile the implementation of X, Y, and Z was to get it out the door on time").

Let me qualify all of this by saying that yes, absolutely, 100% this sort of detailed dysfunction can be inferred from very small amounts of buzzwordy HR text and job ads. I've seen it time and time again, and even been part of the teams responsible for drafting job ads and seeing first hand the thinking processes of HR as they inject all of this awful stuff into it.

There is even a major qualitative social science study about exactly how this kind of vague, symbolic HR-approved linguistic atmosphere is heavily, heavily related to the skewed ethical views held by executives and managers. I strongly urge you to read it if you have not already:

< http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Mazes-World-Corporate-Managers/d... >

I'm not saying that this definitely applies to you (I don't know you). I'm saying that my experiences tells me that the odds are that the team you are representing to "move the ball forward" with a "lean" team that cannot bear "a single unproductive developer" is a very dysfunctional one, and that many of these buzzwords actually imply the opposite of the image they are invoked to create.

⬐ mdpopescu

This is one wall of text that is absolutely worth reading.

⬐ jacques_chester

> If the company embraces a "full-stack" "we're lean so everyone wears many hats" attitude, it's an overt admission that the company couldn't give two shits about what you're actually capable of doing for them, and instead only cares that you do what they happen to tell you to do right now, even if it's hilariously underutilizing you or is hilariously inappropriate for someone with your particular skills, or is using in a way that fails to address critical business needs you've identified.

Another possibility is that the value of shared context and mutual learning is seen as desirable outcomes, on par with production outcomes.

I'm not saying specialisation is unnecessary. But it comes with costs of its own, so some overhead from wasting the specialist's time is worth it.

Just to point out to readers that DannyBee works for Google (reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6658276)

DannyBee - have you read Moral Mazes by Robert Jackall (http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Mazes-World-Corporate-Managers/d...)? It was one of Aaron Swartz's favorite books.

It's an excellent, and fair to all sides, dissection of morality in corporate management. It explains how and why managers rehearse to explain actions their company's have taken.

In this particular comment of yours, you say lots of true things. However, you are not acting in a straightforward "hacker" way, as befits this site, telling the truth how it is.

Google can continue to behave in this way as a company, but it will alas find it harder and harder to hire good geeks.

⬐ DannyBee

"However, you are not acting in a straightforward "hacker" way, as befits this site, telling the truth how it is."

I'm not even sure where to start with your comment, because it implies so much, and has so little to offer.

Rather than address it point by point, i'll just say things:

When i'm speaking for the company I work for, you'll know it, because it'll be a press release that says Google on it. Maybe you are unable to separate your personal and professional lives, and hold opinions separate from your corporations. For me, Google is a company I work for. While I love my job, Google certainly does things i don't always agree with. When it does, i'm certainly not going to avoid saying something because i am "rehearsing to explain the actions my company has taken".

There are a lot of things Android could do better. But in the end, what I see over the years is a lot of whining that it's never enough. From where I sit, Google has taken a lot of flack for actually pushing the ball forward, because it doesn't always go as far as the open source community wants. First they wanted Google to beat up the carriers (without understanding why this is pretty much impossible). Then they complain when we don't. Heck, some people complain android is "too open", because we can't force carriers to give people what they want. I could go on here for hours. Look at the complaints of a lack of a nexus 4 and nexus 5 on certain carriers . Google releases an entire platform, on which other open platforms are now based, and people complain that they have value-added apps that provide a lot of functionality, and haven't opened them. Well great, good for them. This is supposed to be an innovative community. Create your own. Do it better. Do it open, and win. Prove that they made the wrong choice.

Let's stop and be honest for a second. Do you really think something like Firefox OS would even exist (not even just because it is/was based on Android at the lower levels, like Gonk) in the market today if Android had not pushed the ball forward?

When Android was first released, one of my good friends told me no matter what Google did, people would never see it as enough, no matter how open it was. The saddest part to me of all this is that he was right.

Android was never meant to be the end solution, it was meant to be the beginning.

⬐ Apocryphon

Firefox OS certainly would not exist without Google signing the Mozilla Foundation nice big paychecks.

But the mobile web is inevitable. Eventually there will be parity in performance between web apps and native apps. (And Android is on the wrong side of that divide, and Dalvik doesn't exactly help.) Even if Firefox OS isn't doing what it is now, someone would have tried to push for a mobile OS focused on web apps. Perhaps even Samsung.

⬐ gibwell

I don't agree with the parent poster's implication that 'because you work for Google you are a spokesperson'

But.. You have certainly claimed to have authority to speak about parts of Google's strategy because you were in certain meetings.

⬐ DannyBee

I have claimed to know certain things, not to have authority to speak for Google :)

These are very different things, and you should not confuse them.

As i've said before, everything i've stated about these strategies is public knowledge, and often stated by Andy Rubin himself, just not always believed :)

All i've done is basically say "believe it".

⬐ gibwell

What I believe is that (as you have claimed) Android started as open, and is not any longer, but that many advocates of Android (Google included) continue to assert that it is.

You seem to be trying to wriggle out of this by saying that what people mean by Android today has moved past the 'open beginning' that is all that was ever meant to be open, and that's not Google's fault.

I agree that this isn't Google's fault. But let's speak plainly. Android began as open and that was all that Google intended. Things have changed since then and only a part of Android is open anymore.

Why try to claim otherwise?

⬐ DannyBee

Remember earlier when I said "It's just not a point worth arguing with someone who holds a position that clearly conflicts with mine and is highly unlikely to change it."

This is why I said that. You have your belief. You are clearly unlikely to change it no matter what I say. Your goal in this is not to possibly change your belief, but to find a way to confirm it in what i'm saying. This is what people do in these situations.

That does not often generate useful discussion, and it hasn't really here.

Realistically, I haven't tried to wiggle out of anything. It just turns out, as I suggested, we strongly disagree over whether Android is open, whether it was meant to be, and whether it still is.

Rather than continue this unproductive debate, i'm just going to go back to hacking some code on this fine sunday :)

⬐ frabcus

Thanks for this comment - it's much better and clearer than the grandparent at explaining what Google are doing.

All the hard work on Android is much appreciated - I'm really glad Apple didn't gain a monopoly.

⬐ gibwell

Would you prefer that Google gains a monopoly in operating systems as well as search?

⬐ tptacek

What a truly fatuous and obnoxious comment. You've managed to hit most of the HN bullshit argument dog-whistles: accusing people of being shills, invoking Aaron Swartz, arguing on behalf of "hackers", speaking for the rest of the site, and accusing the person you're debating of dishonesty. And you managed to do it in an argument about software licensing. Well played.

⬐ frabcus

Sorry if you find it obnoxious - I was trying to avoid picky, semantic arguments about individual sentences by explaining what was happening at a higher level.

For the record, I'm specifically not accusing DannyBee of dishonesty. The reason I mentioned Moral Mazes as a book is because it explains what happens from the point of view of the managers, and why it comes across to outsiders as dishonest.

This stuff is subtle and systemic.

Fair point about speaking for the site.