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   Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 28-Dec-2025 03:44:07 JST Paul Cantrell

   • Niki Tonsky

   I agree with @nikitonsky , and I think this is at root of much of the managerial mania for LLMs.

   Having their terrible ideas go unchecked by underlings with expertise is basically crack cocaine for bad org leadership.

   1/ https://mastodon.online/@nikitonsky/115792431499413784

   • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
   • Rich Felker repeated this.
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     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 28-Dec-2025 03:48:19 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     People up a few levels in org hierarchies are always coming up with ideas that sound great and make sense in a Powerpoint or on a spreadsheet, but are actually terrible ideas if you understand how they’ll play out.

     This is only human! Management is about seeing things zoomed out — and all problems look smaller at a distance. It’s just a hazard of the job. Anyone in such a role is susceptible, even the best; good managers / administrators mindfully, actively counter this trap.

     2/

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     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 28-Dec-2025 03:51:51 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     When a terrible idea comes from on high, there’s always pushback from the folks on the ground who actually understand how things worked: the engineers at the computers, the teachers in the classrooms, the facilities crews, the kitchen staff, whatever. The folks who live their lives zoomed in on a specific thing may be missing the big picture, but they’re the ones who first see when a managerial notion will have execution problems.

     3/

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     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 28-Dec-2025 03:53:52 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     If you’re a mediocre manager / executive / admin / leader, what this feels like is •you• have a brilliant idea that will fix things or save a bazillion dollars or boost the metrics or whatever, but all these annoying underling keep telling you that you can’t do that for reasons that you don’t understand and that make no sense to you and you suspect they’re kind of making up.

     And you keep saying “Can’t you just…” and they keep giving these confusing gobbledygook answers and the result is that your brilliant leadership cannot come to fruition.

     4/

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     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 28-Dec-2025 04:00:03 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     Underlings are so annoying!

     Sometimes you can make this problem go away by exploiting weak labor power (see: factories, agriculture, sanitation).

     Sometimes you can create a toxic org culture when information •only• flows down the hierarchy, so no pushback can ever reach your sensitive ears. (Public school administrations are rife with this.)

     Sometimes you can do it by making your catastrophic failures look like a string of successes to the people up the chain. (Large corporations are swimming in this.)

     5/

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
     Rich Felker repeated this.
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     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 28-Dec-2025 04:04:47 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     But now, LLMs offer a beautiful new promise: your brilliant notions can proceed full speed without any pesky underlings at all!

     You can just •build the app• or •launch the campaign• or whatever, and nobody will tell you annoying things like “that won’t work” or “that timeline is unrealistic” or “that will create even larger problems” or “people will die.” The chat LLM is there to say YES to your hitherto-unacknowledged brilliance!

     6/

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     Jeff Miller (orange hatband) (jmeowmeow@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 28-Dec-2025 04:09:56 JST Jeff Miller (orange hatband)

     in reply to

     @inthehands "The Reorg Cycle" is my favorite fable about failing(ish) upward by fortuitous timing of the effects of bold managerial action and the evaluation of short- and medium-term results.

     Early results are promising because they address known shortcomings. Medium term results are reversion to the steady state of Melvin Conway's Law, because an org reshuffle gives a different assortment of working contexts, making some coordination harder than before.

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     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 28-Dec-2025 04:13:09 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     I am being a bit cheeky, but I really do think this is a powerful psychological force that shapes orgs far more than we realize: it can be emotionally damaging to have people tell you “no” or question your ideas, and leadership means getting that •all the time•. People in management / executive positions — who are in fact very much people, all too human — will go to great lengths to protect their own psyches from the injury of pushback.

     This is a •powerful• force in orgs.

     7/

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     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 28-Dec-2025 04:15:12 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     An obsequious “always yes” machine…well, your head might say it’s far-fetched, but the instinct for psychological self-defense won’t let your brain let go of it.

     You might say “Don’t they understand [fact about LLMs]???” but the appeal isn’t factual; it’s emotional.

     Ignore that at your peril.

     8/

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     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 28-Dec-2025 04:19:50 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     All these breathless articles about people forming weird relationships with LLMs, ruining marriages or going down psychological rabbit holes because of the addictive quality of “always yes?”

     I think that’s happening to people in management, too, in their professional lives — and they’re making purchase decisions around it.

     9/

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     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 28-Dec-2025 04:21:34 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     So yeah, per the OP, that person who always wanted to ship slop even before LLMs? Now the organizational checks and balances against that are removed — and along with them, away goes this terrible emotional experience.

     Slop, they call it. But how can it be wrong when it •feels so good•?

     /end

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     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 28-Dec-2025 04:22:33 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • Florian 'floe' Echtler

     @floe
     Yeah, that, exactly. I’m additionally proposing that it lets a lot of actual CEOs (vapid and surprisingly less-vapid) feel like they’re the CEO they always imagined they are.

   • Embed this notice
     Florian 'floe' Echtler (floe@hci.social)'s status on Sunday, 28-Dec-2025 04:22:34 JST Florian 'floe' Echtler

     in reply to

     @inthehands I've been saying for a while now that LLMs just let a bunch of vapid people cosplay as CEOs 🤷

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     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 28-Dec-2025 04:31:31 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • Chris Johnson

     @cxj
     I’m not quite willing to go that far, but I view it like this:

     Pre-FDA, people sold •terrible• crap as medicine. If you think it’s bad now, well…yeesh. “Diet pills” that are just sugar-coated tapeworm eggs. Anal suppositories of radium. That sort of thing.

     Does that mean you never seek out •any• form of medicine if you live in the year 1900? No! It means that you stick with trusted sources, and don’t just put any random crap off a shelf into your body. It means you’re thinking about trust in every individual medical interaction, because you can’t generically trust the whole system.

     Depending on software has •always• meant trusting the people who made it. That trust gradient is now a lot steeper.

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     Chris Johnson (cxj@phpc.social)'s status on Sunday, 28-Dec-2025 04:31:33 JST Chris Johnson

     in reply to

     @inthehands I’m beginning to think I don’t want buy anything dependent on software post 2025, and avoid upgrades/updates to things as much as feasible. Unfettered swdev by AI scares the bejeezus out of me.

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     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 28-Dec-2025 04:39:36 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     Some semi-related thoughts here on how slop in business long predates the LLM craze:

     https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/113603661215753448

   • Embed this notice
     0xC0DEC0DE07E8 (c0dec0dec0de@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 28-Dec-2025 04:59:29 JST 0xC0DEC0DE07E8

     in reply to

     @inthehands this happens to ideas all the time! Engineers have ideas that sound great, then you realize while thinking further about it—or during implementation, if you’re unlucky—that the idea doesn’t actually fit reality.

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     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 28-Dec-2025 05:05:57 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • GhostOnTheHalfShell

     @GhostOnTheHalfShell
     If it’s the one I’m thinking of, I’ve heard it with a house on fire

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     GhostOnTheHalfShell (ghostonthehalfshell@masto.ai)'s status on Sunday, 28-Dec-2025 05:05:59 JST GhostOnTheHalfShell

     in reply to

     • Niki Tonsky

     @inthehands @nikitonsky

     This is a nightmare version of the old joke of an engineer, a mathematician and a physicist are all in a car, where the tire blows out.

     You should know the punch line, right?

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     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 28-Dec-2025 05:09:25 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • 0xC0DEC0DE07E8

     @c0dec0dec0de

     Yes. The difference in the scenario you describe is that the person who’s part of coming up with the idea is also the person who directly experiences it not working.

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     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 28-Dec-2025 05:15:40 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • 소주한잔

     @scaramanga
     “Cheeky” referred only to the phrasing, not to the idea

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     소주한잔 (scaramanga@union.place)'s status on Sunday, 28-Dec-2025 05:15:41 JST 소주한잔

     in reply to

     @inthehands i don't think it's cheeky, I think it's the fundamental organizational principle of our culture and has been such for a while now.

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     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 28-Dec-2025 05:16:18 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • Insecurity Princess 🌈💖🔥
     • Niki Tonsky

     @saraislet @nikitonsky
     I’d say that pushback is necessary, and should happen as part of an ongoing collaborative conversation oriented toward shared understanding and trust — instead of as a power struggle.

     I suspect that’s just a different understanding of what counts as “pushback,” though, and we basically agree on this? (To my mind, “I’m not sure that will work” “Oh? Tell me more” is pushback followed by a healthy response to pushback.)

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     Insecurity Princess 🌈💖🔥 (saraislet@infosec.exchange)'s status on Sunday, 28-Dec-2025 05:16:19 JST Insecurity Princess 🌈💖🔥

     in reply to

     • Niki Tonsky

     @inthehands @nikitonsky I think that when an organization is at the point of pushback on leader decisions, they've already failed.

     Good leaders think ahead, gather relevant context, and incorporate feedback early in decision-making to develop sustainable strategic plans to support a well thought-out vision, even when the details aren't fully established or explored yet (not necessarily rigorously planned).

     When leaders are hearing the most obvious concerns in pushback, either they've anticipated and planned for expected attrition because their vision is a change of mission or culture for the organization, or my cynicism has exceeded my ability to avoid making undercooked absolute statements, because (speaking beyond any organizations I've been part of) this year has been a boondoggle for unsustainable executive decisions

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     Rachael L (r343l@freeradical.zone)'s status on Sunday, 28-Dec-2025 05:28:16 JST Rachael L

     in reply to

     @inthehands Good leaders in my experience are actually quite aware of this tension and actively worry when people don't bring problems or "no" to them. A good leader knows they need to accept the negative feedback gracefully so they can continue to get important information and not have people self-censoring. (Obv even "good" leaders don't manage it all the time or for all topics!)

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     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 28-Dec-2025 05:28:16 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • Rachael L

     @r343l
     Yes, exactly so. See also the last sentence of this post:
     https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/115793020396469583

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     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 28-Dec-2025 05:42:01 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • Rachael L

     @r343l

     Creating trust and a safe environment is •incredibly• hard even when everybody wants that!

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     Rachael L (r343l@freeradical.zone)'s status on Sunday, 28-Dec-2025 05:42:02 JST Rachael L

     in reply to

     @inthehands lol of course I forgot that bit by the time I got to the post I replied to that. anyway I think about it a lot when I notice how quiet people on my team are or not asking questions. getting folks to engage can be hard because even opening up the topic may feel risky to someone.

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     Eleanor Saitta (dymaxion@infosec.exchange)'s status on Sunday, 28-Dec-2025 06:53:21 JST Eleanor Saitta

     in reply to

     • Niki Tonsky

     @inthehands
     And by allegory with Gresham's law, over a sufficient time period and in absence of a significant counterveiling force, all org leadership becomes bad. If you're a leader who only cares about personal power and wealth, got have an advantage over anyone who is getting to balance avarice with the good of the organization, let alone the good of society. So folks with that mindset will eventually run the majority of organizations, until and unless their avarice kills the company.
     @nikitonsky

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     Yeshaya Lazarevich (alter_kaker@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 28-Dec-2025 09:14:26 JST Yeshaya Lazarevich

     in reply to

     @inthehands it's an interesting process you're describing. I have all sorts of thoughts but I don't think that I can properly express them in this format. Lot's to chew on, from a philosophical perspective.

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     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 28-Dec-2025 10:12:19 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • Yeshaya Lazarevich

     @alter_kaker Well, curious to here your thoughts when they’re formed.

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     Marsh Gardiner 💡🐝🔧 (earth2marsh@hachyderm.io)'s status on Tuesday, 03-Feb-2026 02:44:36 JST Marsh Gardiner 💡🐝🔧

     in reply to

     @inthehands see also: billionaires