= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
JoshuaFox comments on Why officers vs. enlisted? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (143)
A priori, I'd say any enlisted/NCO would prefer being an officer (if they didn't have to work for it, etc.). There are very few people who actively prefer a subordinate role; everyone wants more money and power, at least in principle, though some want it more than others.
Most managers are not executives. The executive/non-exec border is mostly a dividing line between some managers and others. "Individual contributors" are completely out of the running here, just as privates in the army are nowhere near being officers (in contrast to Chief Master Sergeants, about whom we might ask why they are not officers.)
There are also a very few "individual contributors" who are execs, such as a tiny handful of top technical people in some tech companies.
Yes. Now, why are these treated as different professions rather than as different levels of the same professions? Other "professions" have radically different tasks, prestige, and compensation for different levels.
That may be so, but there are a lot of people who would actively prefer NOT to take on serious responsibilities.
There may be, for that does not characterize most master sergeants, nor more most senior (non-exec) managers, most of whom would most certainly like to be execs.
[edit] But I agree with you -- if we follow LessWrong's line of thought about agentiness, then yes, a lot of people prefer to avoid responsibility.
Most people would like to have a higher-status role. That doesn't mean it's not a separate profession requiring different skills.
That's true. I didn't mean to conflate the two, but to offer engineers vs. their managers as another example of distinct subordinate and superior classes where it makes sense to have two hierarchies.
Partly because they are in a large degree different professions requiring different skills, and not translating experience well.
Indeed, I've heard people make the argument that only having a single hierarchy is a common problem in the field of software engineering, since it forces programmers who want to be promoted to do a job they're not necessarily well-suited for, and which they might not like. Having separate "programming" and "management" promotion tracks was considered a clearly superior alternative.
Surely there are not two alternatives being compared here but three. (1) A single hierarchy with programmers at the bottom and managers at the top and fairly straightforward progression all the way up. (2) Two hierarchies, one for programmers, one for managers, with the managerial one viewed as above the programmers' one. (3) Two hierarchies, one for programmers, one for managers, truly parallel, with comparable levels of status and pay available on both.
There is an obvious reason for programmers (and others) to prefer #3 to #1 because it allows people to carry on doing what they're good at and enjoy, but #2 (which is what one typically gets in practice, and I would strongly suspect it even when there are notionally parallel hierarchies) is not such a clear improvement.
What does "above" mean? Managers necessarily tell the programmers what to do a lot of the time; that's just part of managing people. For humans, this seems to be inescapably tied to higher social status.
Is there a separate sense of "above" you refer to? Higher paychecks for managers are common. But then I might as well ask the more general question of why different job-tracks have different paychecks at similar levels of experience, seniority, and skill percentile. There are various reasons; one is that the top-level executives deciding on paycheck policy are usually promoted from the top ranks of the management track, rather than a technical one.
In principle, that two-hierarchy system, #3 above could allow for true parallelism: The most senior people on the technical ladder would have a boss, like anyone else, but this boss would be someone who is way up the management ladder. Also, in this hypothetical system, the top non-manager technical people would have similar compensation to top managers.
In practice, the most senior people on the ladder simply merge into the management ladder, so that at that point there is no non-management technical ladder.
So, #2 above is far more common.
Some companies have option #2, a technical ladder for non-managers, where the managerial ladder is strictly superior in terms of informal social status and compensation. A few very advanced companies may offer #3 or something like it.
To the extent they do, we see another case of two ladders, but this time with a very obvious reason, much less a mystery than the officer/enlisted or exec/manager distinction.
Officers might not be so good at doing sergeant work, and doctors not so good at nurses' work, but no doctor would get in trouble with the law for doing a nurse's work, but vice versa, the nurse would. Likewise for officers and NCOs. In practice, that might be true, but this whole thread is asking why the official distinction exists.
[edited for brevity]
I've seen many doctors who couldn't do a nurse's work. They could maybe fill in for an hour if no-one else was available, but they couldn't really replace one.
Soldiers are a special case because junior officers lead their men into battle. So officers, at least young and fit ones, should be able to replace ordinary soldiers.
My best answer has two parts.
The first is the exaggeration of status differences that happens when two different professions work closely together. Any initial difference in status - maybe one profession has a higher bar to entry (diploma / entrance exam / professional licensing), or maybe it's a historical artifact (noble officers with commissions vs. drafted soldiers), or maybe one is the manager of the other and gets to order them around. Then the "upper class" tries to preserve the "gap" and prevent the formation of just such a single-ladder system as you describe. The upper class closes ranks against the lower class to prevent social mobility, as it were.
The second factor is that the two classes are at least partially distinct professions and require different training or qualifications. So any new people coming into the system have already decided which class they belong to.
Sure. But the System doesn't think that way. A nurse can get in trouble with the law for doing what a doctor does. can a doctor get in trouble with the law for doing what a nurse does?
Yes, that's it.
No, most managers are not execs.
I can't see much qualitative difference between the" professions" of senior manager and executive , except for this implicit presumption of agentiness.
Perhaps there's simply no need for legislation that would prevent a doctor from working as a nurse. No doctor would even consider this option unless the situation is seriously screwed up. A nurse working as a doctor can do much more damage than a doctor working as a nurse. Or put in another way, an incompetent doctor will do much more damage than an incompetent nurse.
I don't see why. Either can kill the patients they work with, or set bad standards for other doctors/nurses.
A doctor has responsibility over many more patients. A doctor's competence is more complex, so he has more ways to screw up. A doctor can make more autonomous decisions, often makes them alone, and can't as easily ask help from others. He also leads a team, so he doesn't have to execute all his mistakes himself.
I disagree with your implication. Most doctors and nurses are responsible for specific treatment aspects of a few tens or hundreds of individuals. A small minority of doctors influence larger numbers (e.g. department heads), but even then many of their instructions are carried out by nurses and junior doctors.
Nurses who administer treatments have ways to screw up that are not available to doctors who merely select those treatments. A doctor can order a harmful procedure; a nurse can actually administer the wrong drug by mistake. A doctor can make a mistake in surgery; a nurse can make a mistake in intensive care.
I think empirical data is needed to elucidate the amount of mistakes (or "responsibility") owned by doctors and nurses. It's not something that can be clearly deduced from first principles.
You disagree with the implication or the claim? Do you disagree with it completely or do you think it's exaggerated? ETA: It seems it was exaggerated, but right. There are about 3 nurses per doctor on average in OECD countries.
That's one of the key points I made. A nurse can't make other people carry out mistaken orders. A person carrying out a mistaken order isn't necessarily incompetent, although in easy to spot cases they are.
Sure. A doctor has hundreds (or thousands) of diagnoses and medications to choose from. That makes me pretty confident that he has more options for fatal mistakes, and that the probability of doing the right thing is much lower.
I think the more difficult question is what constitutes incompetence, and what levels of incompetence are comparable in nurses and doctors. I strongly suspect that our main disagreement comes from this aspect.
I think I agree what Joshua said here so debating this point much further isn't of much interest anymore.
I don't think that degree of damage is the essential point. Both can do significant damage.
I'm pretty sure you misunderstood what I said. Read it again. If not, try to think of examples more broadly. Your example misses the point.
Edited to be less snarky.
Thanks, I've edited it.
Yeah. Sorry about the hostile tone.
Agreed. There is no qualitative difference between senior manager and executive beyond the increased scope of responsibilities and scale with which your decisions affect others, both of which could be attributed to the word "agentiness."
Could well be, but why does this concept of "executive" as a distinct group exist? Why not just have some managers who are more senior than others.
I don't think MDs are automatically allowed to practice as nurses, if that's what you mean. Also, nurses have specialization just like doctors do, and only those with the needed training and certification are allowed to perform various special procedures. And I'm pretty sure doctors aren't allowed to perform those procedures.
Why does it matter? MDs are special in the eyes of the law, but that's just something special to MDs, and indended to curb malpractice and charlatans, not just to preserve a guild's power. Executives aren't a legally special class. For army officers the question doesn't arise.
I can't see much segregation between the two, either. Senior managers often become execs. Maybe it's a difference in the corporate cultures of our experiences, and your agentiness model fits the culture you describe.
I'm pretty sure that executives have legal liabilities that non-execs lack, although that might apply in most cases just to the top execs.
The question of being legally allowed to do certain things? There are lots of duties in the army that only an officer can legally do but an NCO cannot, but not the other way around.
I'm thinking of very large companies, including those I have worked in; and those I have read about. Startups allow agentiness to everyone.
Particular roles (CEO, board member, CFO, ...) have particular legal responsibilities. I don't think there's any law addressing executives or "top executives" as a class.
There are roles that require being an officer, sure. But more technically, they always require being an officer of a certain minimum grade. Other positions require being a non-officer of a certain grade or above. And plenty of technical positions require specific training and certification, regardless of officer status.
I would describe it as startups requiring agentiness from almost everyone qualified to work in a startup. Otherwise it becomes just a small company and probably fails.
The startup where I work is just now transitioning into a post-investment non-startup company with a board of managers. And so, for the first time, we're explicitly looking to hire non-agenty people to fill some junior roles. Agentiness is very much the word I'd use to describe some of our staffing decisions. But we still don't have anything like an exec vs. everyone else distinction. I'm one of two technical architects, a programmer, very agenty, and definitely not an "executive" (and I don't have any legally binding duties beyond an ordinary employee with a contract).
Interesting example of non-agentiness being considered a plus for some jobs.
It's not a plus, it's an acceptable minus, a trade-off vs. a lower paycheck.
There are lots of things people might prefer if they didn't have to work for them. :)
Because they're at the top of their career, so why should they give that up to be at the bottom of a new career? This, I have read, is what some of them would say.
Of course, that begs the question of why there are two ladders, but given that there are, it seems a reasonable response.
OK, good points.
To the extent that officer status correlates with agentiness, and that some people are not agenty, then some people would not want to be officers. I am not sure about the antecedents in the preceding sentence, however.
That strikes me as an awfully sheltered, possibly even Jewish thing to say. I've heard this is true in the Israeli army, elsewhere not so much.
While I suspect I know what you mean, I'm left somewhat agog here at the implication that "Jewish" is an extreme form of "sheltered."
Heh. That might be this "Jewish humor" I hear so much about.
Given that in my experience and by what I've heard, self-deprecation is a common element in Jewish humor, yes.
To the extent that the framework in this post is true, it is possible that some people are put off from the requirement to be agenty. As to whether Jews think that way less or more than others ... hmmm....
And as to whether I am sheltered from non-agentiness: I see a lot of non-agentiness, no shortage of that.
I have personally known and known of several people who prefer being enlisted men, NCOs, or warrant officers to commissioned officers simply because commissioned officers inevitably end up in a management role, while others can more or less stay in a role where they actually do things directly for the entirety of their career.