He hits upon a quite interesting division of labor. Where I've worked in finance, there's been "strategists" and there's been "developers". You can guess which one is seen as high prestige.
The problem arises when someone gets into a position where they can think big thoughts without having to do any nitty gritty. Effectively, they end up jumping in right when the real producers have finished the actual work, and then coming up with some polish that makes it look like they came up with some interesting result.
This is not actually a way to get work done. It's a way to play politics.
Worse yet, it's actually completely detrimental to getting things done. When you have things split up between thinkers and doers, what do the incentives look like? It's quite simple. I may order some analysis, and I may not fully understand the nuances. But whatever happens, as a thinker I'll have to have something grandiose to say, and I'll need to keep the doers busy. That way if I don't find a real conclusion, it's everyone's fault. If I do find something, it's thanks to me.
Where I worked the people with the big plans couldn't code their way out of a paper bag. Ask them what Big-O is, they draw a blank. Ask them how their trading strategy will actually send orders to the exchange, they draw a blank. But ask them something that sounds like strategy, and they will feed you plenty of unsubstantiated BS.
My new venture is coders all the way down. Strategists who can actually use git without asking what it is, understand that algorithmic complexity actually matters, and so on. Coders who understand what the market is.
The more I think about making credit match with work in an organisation, the more it looks like a neural network where the credit/revenue/profit gradient is having problems being back-propagated.
In the horizontal setup you describe (layer of thinkers on top of layer of doers), credit hits a barrier at the thinkers. The gradient isn't propagated.
In the vertical setup in the article (layer of thinker-doers), of course the backprop will be good because it is only one layer thick. You gain proper incentives, proper treatment of data on the whole pipeline. And the engineers can also concentrate on a purely orthogonal thing: writing tools.
But you lose the benefit of having the layer being able to focus on one thing. The author acknowledges those efficiencies (his word). It is hard to find people with a wide set of skills. Although in this case it is balanced, as now the engineers have gained specialization.
But I digress. My point was: humans in orgs are bad at backprop. Why share the credit at all? Organisations can be seen as neural networks/graphs, and they can lack proper backprop.
I'd love to see the results of some pagerank-like backprop. Every employee gets one base point. Every week, he is asked: "who helped you the most in doing your job this week?". Sales would credit analysts who would credit engineers, etc. Or Sales would credit analysts-engineers who would credit tool-writers, etc. It could go both ways: engineers could credit sales or analysts for writings well thought-out problem descriptions.
Then you would run pagerank on it, and base every promotion, every salary increase on it. Information would flow well, and everybody has a clear direction (his gradient) of what he can do to shine.
Also, by injecting revenue at the sales layer in a certain period of time, you could identify who conctributed the most in an increase of revenue.
Also, I posit that managers have a tiny view of what happens in a firm. They only get to see a fraction of interactions, while the brunt of what matters happens in the long tail of one-to-one interactions. Should you chose to promote people with the highest PR, you would have a true result-based bottom-up org.
The problem arises when someone gets into a position where they can think big thoughts without having to do any nitty gritty. Effectively, they end up jumping in right when the real producers have finished the actual work, and then coming up with some polish that makes it look like they came up with some interesting result.
This is not actually a way to get work done. It's a way to play politics.
Worse yet, it's actually completely detrimental to getting things done. When you have things split up between thinkers and doers, what do the incentives look like? It's quite simple. I may order some analysis, and I may not fully understand the nuances. But whatever happens, as a thinker I'll have to have something grandiose to say, and I'll need to keep the doers busy. That way if I don't find a real conclusion, it's everyone's fault. If I do find something, it's thanks to me.
Where I worked the people with the big plans couldn't code their way out of a paper bag. Ask them what Big-O is, they draw a blank. Ask them how their trading strategy will actually send orders to the exchange, they draw a blank. But ask them something that sounds like strategy, and they will feed you plenty of unsubstantiated BS.
My new venture is coders all the way down. Strategists who can actually use git without asking what it is, understand that algorithmic complexity actually matters, and so on. Coders who understand what the market is.