Advantages of incompetent management

Optimization, efficiency, and perverse incentives

• Many distinguish “improving things” from strict optimization toward a single metric.
• Over-optimization is likened to strip-mining: it boosts one metric while leaving systems brittle and hollow.
• Compile-time optimizations are called out as a special case where you can prove safety; most real-world optimization lacks that safety.
• Several tie this to Goodhart’s law: once a measure becomes a target, people game it, e.g., adding bugs to “fix,” or creating waste to later “optimize.”

Budgets, constraints, and resource hoarding

• Strong support for the article’s claim that “spend-or-lose” budgeting and CI/resource baselining incentivize hoarding.
• Analogies: western water rights, airline “ghost flights,” satellite slots, government and corporate end-of-year spending sprees.
• Some argue tighter constraints can improve outcomes (discipline, creativity), but only when self-imposed or under leaders who can flex rules in emergencies.
• Others note leadership rarely “shrinks its own budget,” reinforcing misaligned incentives.

Compute resources, embedded systems, and waste

• Embedded developers describe extreme optimization under hard limits (KBs of RAM) vs “somewhat constrained” devices with hundreds of MB, where bloat creeps in.
• In server/cloud contexts, individual teams often see CPU/RAM as effectively unlimited (“just pay the cloud more”), encouraging inefficient code and architectures.
• Counterpoint: compute is not truly unlimited; it consumes land, energy, and water, so the “infinite cloud” is a damaging myth.

CI systems and infrastructure “efficiency”

• Widespread frustration that CI is often far slower than local machines despite more cores in the cloud.
• Causes cited: slow networked storage, security/IT “crapware,” cold-start times, excessive clean builds, oversized test suites, and “cloud best practices” that recreate expensive state each run.
• Some advocate running tests locally by default; others point to autoscaling runners and better caching as partial fixes.
• Consensus: the bottleneck is usually organizational/process decisions, not raw compute scarcity.

Management competence, hierarchy, and culture

• Several argue both “competent” and “incompetent” examples in the article are actually bad management: one over-processes and over-metrics, the other abdicates.
• Disagreement over defining managerial competence:
  • One side: “sets and achieves objectives” is too weak; you must also choose the right objectives and use resources efficiently.
  • Other side: under bounded rationality, “setting and achieving objectives” is a pragmatic definition, and some ugly behaviors follow naturally from that.
• Multiple comments note that as organizations grow, hierarchies and politics reassert themselves, even after idealistic starts.

Alternative organizational models and their fragility

• Detailed anecdotes about companies that used:
  • Strong shared mission and “economic thinking” (everyone considers ROI).
  • Consensus decision making, distributed authority, profit sharing, and peer-based compensation.
  • “Unit presidency” or “cellular” models where small units own their economics.
• These environments are remembered as highly effective and motivating, but often collapsed when:
  • Acquisitions brought in incompatible cultures.
  • New leadership abandoned core principles, reintroduced hierarchy, and tolerated politics.
• Many conclude such heterodox models can work, but are fragile, require unusually strong leadership, and are hard to scale or sustain.

Metrics, KPIs, and gaming

• Broad agreement that fixed KPIs and quotas quickly get gamed (bug counts, cost reductions, call times, etc.).
• One proposal: vary which real business metric is rewarded each period, chosen unpredictably, to make gaming harder and reward general good work.
• Others report similar schemes in call centers leading to confusion, demoralization, and perceived bad faith rather than better behavior.

Autonomy, “laziness,” and delegation

• Several defend “healthy laziness”: avoiding pointless work, resisting micromanagement, and leaving room to think.
• Historical and military examples are used to argue for mission-level goals with strong delegation: people closest to the information should decide details.
• Counterpoint: many leaders lack the trust or courage to delegate, fearing blame for subordinate mistakes, so they pull decisions upward and add process.