[dtech]

It's pretty simple: those people are the absolute experts in their field, similar to those top chemists or whatever. That field is societal power systems.

Of course someone who dedicated his time to climbing and understanding power systems will have more power than someone who doesn't.

[api]

Sure, but then my question is why we need them. What service do they provide? That’s what I was speculating about. I don’t buy the conspiracy theory that they’re pure parasites, since hosts without parasites would then be stronger and would ultimately outcompete.

We have all the skills to do all the things without these power systems so what are they for?

I don’t mean policing and courts. Those are administrative and managerial functions. I mean power of the sort that makes large numbers of people do stuff. I mean gurus and aggrandizers, basically. The people who con and goad us into doing hard things.

My hypothesis is that we can’t self generate that due to neurological limitations rooted in our evolutionary history in a much slower world that rarely changed.

Amphetamine could work too but it has ugly side effects. Social pressure is less hazardous and scales better.

[phtrivier]

Managers are here to accommodate the need for cooperation, while compensating for lack of telepathy.

Put two people with a lot of expertise in different domain. Require them to come up with a solution to a problem you have.

That's three people. You'll get at the very least four opinions about each and every step.

Scale the complexity of the problems and the number of people.

You end up with full time jobs consisting purely in routing information from brain A to brain Z.

Unfortunately, the skills to do this job are never properly taught, but learnt in the job. (MBA don't teach management - they either teach the mechanism of some administration, or ways to get rich consulting.)

Problems occur because we conflate management, supervision, decision making, strategy setting, etc...

P.H.B. is an antipattern, a caricature, a stereotype like all other : it's funny cause there is truth to it. But we are by no mean condemned to fulfill our stereotypes (should I remind all engineers here about the stigmas attached to nerd in the real world ?)

[erichocean]

The WIDGET model of "working geniuses" is one possible answer, it does explain a lot of team dynamics in my experience.

Since no one has all six working geniuses, and you're only a genius at two, it takes a collection of people, proportional to the work that needs to be done, of each type.

[zozbot234]

> I don’t mean policing and courts. Those are administrative and managerial functions.

Middle management is also an admininstrative and managerial function. Even in a best-case scenario, coördinating work among a huge amount of people within enterprises that are mostly run via command-and-control mechanisms and inside politics (as opposed to any self-regulating "market") obviously takes a whole lot of effort. That's really the natural job description for PHB's.

[dasil003]

People are not inspired by institutions and committees, you need a personality that can articulate a vision.