A related and more pernicious issue, in my view, is that companies have a tendency to hire before they trust.
Valve's ideology is "We hired you, we trust you." That doesn't mean that they give new hires all the keys, but the going assumption is that anyone who gets in is a competent adult who doesn't need to be restrained with typical, military-style subordination. If you're going to hire someone, then trust that person with his or her own time. If you can't, then don't hire.
Most companies grow too fast and end up hiring before they trust. This causes a loss of focus, because they need to generate busywork projects for the new hires, but it also creates a dynamic where there are Real Fooblers (for a company named Foobar) and everyone else, and the company has no problem generating a bunch of shit work for the "everyone else" category so the Real Fooblers can work on the fun stuff.
Talents of leadership and architecture can be assessed later on, but everyone worth hiring should start out with the basic right to direct her career and, when the time comes, prove herself.
Oh, if only corporate subordination were military style. A fresh Marine recruit knows the names of the five links in the chain of commmand between him and the President; meanwhile, Peter Gibbons has to answer to eight bosses, some of whom he hadn't heard of until they drop by to ask if he got the TPS report memo.
I think it was legitimized by having it happen in pretty much every big company ever. It is the "I made this company (or weaseled by way onto the board / highest layer of management), I'm boss, I don't want to hear from anyone else how I do things because its mine, I have the power, obey me. It comes off as very 3 year old immaturity.
When I say that it's not legitimated, I'm not saying that it's illegitimate philosophically (although I think it is) but that such managers do a poor job of convincing other people that their power is legitimate.
In the military, most people buy in to the rank system. A major component of the abuse inflicted in basic training is to tear someone's ego down and build the person back up again as someone who can take orders. The result is that a lot of them come out of the process genuinely believing that the commanding officer's power is legitimate. In most companies, nothing happens to convince the grunts that the managerial power is legitimate, since most managers are puppet leaders rather than the leaders that the group would pick.
> but that such managers do a poor job of convincing other people that their power is legitimate.
Don't they convince their shareholders? These companies keep making it big even with tremendous overhead of useless management and they seem to do it by pitching investors and locking down markets.
Valve's ideology is "We hired you, we trust you." That doesn't mean that they give new hires all the keys, but the going assumption is that anyone who gets in is a competent adult who doesn't need to be restrained with typical, military-style subordination. If you're going to hire someone, then trust that person with his or her own time. If you can't, then don't hire.
Most companies grow too fast and end up hiring before they trust. This causes a loss of focus, because they need to generate busywork projects for the new hires, but it also creates a dynamic where there are Real Fooblers (for a company named Foobar) and everyone else, and the company has no problem generating a bunch of shit work for the "everyone else" category so the Real Fooblers can work on the fun stuff.
Talents of leadership and architecture can be assessed later on, but everyone worth hiring should start out with the basic right to direct her career and, when the time comes, prove herself.