Item — HN Reader

He said open source norms intended to protect the integrity of the project, including public discussion over calls, broad consensus before decisions, and scheduling that accommodated global time zones, had created a culture that made it functionally impossible to resolve even minor disputes without a weeks-long Slack thread and a cast of dozens. ... He acknowledged he had created many of the structures he was now criticizing. In stepping back from day-to-day leadership, he said, he had deliberately delegated decision-making broadly and built committees and governance layers.

This is not just an open source thing, or a Wordpress thing. I've seen it in nonprofit operations where committees take ages to make simple, sensible decisions (and sometimes still get it wrong!).

I suspect it's an issue in large companies that operate by consensus or are hidebound to authority and protocol. How many large companies in Silicon Valley make a point of saying they want to "move like a startup"?

3 comments

Bureaucracy. I met an army officer once in a Corporation (government) office. Both of us were there to get the same paperwork done, but the army officer also needed his address revised (the corporation had issued a new number for his house). When we received our new documents, his document still showed the old address. He went to the bureaucrat who had processed it and asked why the address wasn't updated even though he had specifically requested that it be done. After some "consultation" with her co-workers, and a senior on her phone, she honestly blurted out - Sir, we don't know how to do that. It's some other department. I will have to consult my senior officer in that department and find out. Can you come back later?. As he shared his frustration he told me that civil bureaucrats needed to be trained like army officers. Army officers, he explained, were trained in multiple-disciplines because during a war they can't stop to search for the "right" person to do some task. Everyone in the field needed to sometimes improvise and be ready to take over someone else's task. Civil bureaucrats on the other hand are trained in a single discipline, tended to defend their specialisation, and thus get totally stumped when facing something outside their training.

It was an interesting insight: While department hierarchy must be respected, it shouldn't be organisationally rigid to prevent inter-departmental, inter-disciplinary learning. Lower ranking sub-units should also be given more freedom to make independent decisions.

Perhaps. But issue here is the guy doing the critique is the guy with A LOT of power. There is no “we,” not in the context of this type of rant.

Leader create more / new leaders. That isn’t happening. MM has only himself to blame

Nearly the same as the number of large companies in Silicon Valley who want everyone to feel good about a decision internally but don’t care in the slightest about how outsiders feel about it. Matt unfortunately makes a solid point, weakened as it may be by his presentation: consensus-based project management is around two orders of magnitude slower than authority-based project management, as currently implemented by most open-source and open-source-like projects. Ghostty is a good example of authority-based project management, and advances far more efficiently towards its goals than Wordpress. I will freely admit that I’m biased to assign zero relevance to people’s emotional hangups about having to disagree and commit; having seen that catering to soothing ego dramas in project processes, rather than directing those with personal drama to professional counseling out-of-band from the project itself, serves up a catastrophic derail for any serious effort, I now have zero tolerance for “we will never agree, we haven’t the courage to decide, and we have not assigned any individual as final decision-maker”.

Regarding the main story’s point, I think the original concern raised (the committee balked while a paid employee got lightning-quick approval) is correctly addressed by focusing attention upon consensus-based project management as a defect in short- and medium-term work. It’s the right approach for long-term work — otherwise you get yanked around as priorities shift in the wind by a shifty leader (see also Tesla) — but it’s the wrong approach for making any decisions in less than a year of consideration.