Big picture

Posted Feb 14, 2025 17:53 UTC (Fri) by branden (guest, #7029)
In reply to: Big picture by koverstreet
Parent article: New leadership for Asahi Linux

Permit me to attempt to rise to the challenge of the "Big picture" subject. The reader may want to brew a coffee for this one. (Or skip it.)

"We've got a real problem with overprofessionalism (c.f. elite overproduction in society at large); this where some of my beef with the CoC and the committee's approach comes from."

I don't think you're wrong, but I think your statement is easily misread. Let me attempt my own interpretation of it, with which you will not necessarily agree.

Our society (I'll speak here mainly of the U.S.--problems are similar though less extreme elsewhere) overproduces people credentialed for management. Unlike many, I don't claim that our ratios of engineering to social science to management to liberal arts graduates are out of whack, for the simple reason that in much U.S. employment, a bachelor's degree in _any discipline of study_ is regarded as a qualifying criterion for a management role--and often does most of the lifting of "sufficiency" for such a position.

And the reason people seek out these management roles after graduating college is that in many or most sectors, they're the only ones that pay a true living wage or offer a plausible path to one. Everybody else is tied to the federal minimum wage (or compensated by some meager increment above it), which hasn't approached a living wage in the memory of most of the workforce.

Understandably, every kid's parents push hard to get as many of their offspring as possible into the college prep/future management track, even if they have no temperament for or interest in knowledge production via scholarly methods (the reason universities exist). We end up with more "managers" than we need, but there's a tacit agreement in business leadership not to proletarianize the bulk of them (say, by sectors of the economy proclaiming, "okay, that's enough, no first-line managers without master's degrees"), because that risks upsetting the political equilibrium upon which the existing systems of rent extraction depend. The end result is a sloshy mass of managers without much real managing to do, so they become mandarins or commissars, the latter being a feature of the Soviet system but, being too good an idea to let die with communism, now constitute a means of achieving government "efficiency".

The result is that we have a lot of superfluous people applying their management training--or what passed for it--in places and to situations where worker self-management was adequate, or should have been permitted to develop organically, from the bottom up rather than top down. We see repeated instances of two kinds of problem. (A) heavy-handed CoC enforcers, often drafted from outside the communities they serve--because they're "professionals"--decreeing expulsions of significant (but not top-tier) contributors and drawing backlash, not because there wasn't a problem, but because the instincts of that community respond appropriately to sledgehammer tactics applied by people in mallet-shaped who have no other function and can contribute nothing else. And (B) an elite class of special contributors against whom the sledgehammer will never be swung no matter what. Sure, we can talk them into going to "sensitivity training" once, maybe. After that they'll rediscovered their indispensability, knowing just as do their employers that they can find greener pa$ture$ elsewhere. Given the choice to retain between one of marquee people and a faceless functionary, the outcome is obvious. That dynamic creates intense competition for one of those coveted untouchable spots, which in turn promotes bunker mentalities, rivalries, territoriality, and personal attachment to work product (like kernel subsystems) with which one is publicly associated in the minds of the community.

In summary, many projects seem to have drifted into a place where all of an immature developer's worst inclinations are seen to be indulged--if you're one of the "right" developers. A project survives and develops successfully in spite of these perverse incentives, not because of them. It's good that we have so many basically honorable and decent people attached to FLOSS projects, and a deep shame that the conventional wisdom is that they need to be managed "better" with approaches that will actively harm them.

Management is often a necessary function. But as with many products and services, buying from the seller employing the highest-pressure tactics or who pushes the least rational arguments ("everybody else is doing it!"), often leaves one underwhelmed and experiencing remorse. (But we can talk you out of saying so. C'mon, you can't just be disparaging managers like that. Do you want people to think you're a Marxist?)

I'll leave you with a lengthy quote from a historian friend of mine that helps show how we got here.

"Whereas in previous models of corporate governance, large shareholders (often from founding families like Ford) appointed fellow members of the owner class, the old school bourgeoisie/owner class, to internal office within these companies. In other words, one amassed stock (by inheritance or profit in another company) and then ascended to leadership. But the commissar class offered a concurrent competing model whereby one was appointed to leadership by other members of this class who managed funds and held voting proxies and, from that position, compensated oneself with shares and stock options.

"This ascendant class based these appointments on an expanding academic discipline, “business administration,” the skill at and understanding of the management of people based on the ability to analyze and manipulate mass psychology through statistical analysis. Whether this actually made any company more efficient is entirely debatable. The point is that the commissar class could justify its amplification of its own power by using a meritocratic discourse of expertise, not in what the company made or did but in psychological manipulation. People who ran companies, according to the logic of the commissars, didn’t run them because they were rich or because they understood the industry and had risen through its ranks but because they were masters of an arcane science McNamara and his ilk had helped to create.

"It was therefore perfectly logical that the commissars would endow business schools with funds to make more commissars. And as the austerity programs the commissars championed went into effect, these schools came to exercise an outside influence on university cultures as they expanded financially while the rest of the universities contracted. Logically, of course, the way to save other parts of the universities was to make them more closely resemble the business schools that produced the commissars or, conversely, to reassure the commissars by withdrawing into various forms of immaterialism so as not to produce graduates who might make competing meritocratic claims on the basis of specific, disciplinary knowledge as opposed to the meta-science of management. In other words, the postmodern turn and the rise of the business school were of a piece with one another, both driven by austerity, the ascendance of the commissars, Soviet subversion and immaterialism. By immaterialism, I mean that management was increasingly a science of psychological analysis and manipulation while humanities and social science scholarship relocated from describing the physical world to describing people’s thoughts about that world. The idea that reality is a social construction is one equally championed by the business schools and postmodernists who seized control of humanities and social science scholarship.

"These processes were already underway when the Eastern European dictatorships that had helped create them collapsed one after another. But without the worry of the Soviet Bloc as competition and with the removal of any serious political alternative, commissar-driven austerity could accelerate, as it rapidly did in the 1990s, raising tuition fees, ensuring that those working class people who did rise through the university system would be heavily indebted and thereby more controllable should they attempt to join this ascendant class.

I concede that this sort of analysis wanders far from LWN's editorial concerns. I realize that we're all here to hack, not to understand why firms like Intel or trade associations like the Linux Foundation operate the way they do.