I once worked in a government agency where 4 employees used a app that on ran on IE6. So the rest of the 2000 strong organization had to use chrome by remote desktop into a server.

Decision tree: Does any department still use IE6? Yes -> lets setup a Remote Desktop cluster so the rest can use Chrome

The short of it is: no one gives a shit about anything but their own paycheck and getting off of work at 5pm.

It's the human condition (and also in part the companies' own fault since they stopped investing in employees)

The people who give a shit and are passionate eventually join the other 99.9%, because it's absolutely exhausting pulling the cart with 10 freeloaders on it who don't care.

I envy the people who can give a shit for longer than 2-3 years at any given job. I suppose being your own boss is one of the few ways to stay passionate and care about something for a long enough period of time.

This is like a perfect case study in how problems don't get solved, they just get… routed

Liars gonna lie.

> I challenged him on this by Googling the Intune manual to set the default browser.

I've found that LLMs really democratize debate when issues like this arise!

Can't guarantee you'll win, but when someone bets you're not willing to RTFM to call their bluff-- Oh boy!

The truth is you can't get anyone to do what you want. You can try to make them do what you want but they're someone else in the end. Sir Walter Raleigh's beloved friend and lieutenant was Lawrence Kemys. When Raleigh was pardoned and sent back to find El Dorado, the conditions set were that he should not attack the Spaniards. He goes out to South America, and puts a detachment ashore led by his close friend and confidant - as aligned a person as you can imagine. Kemys attacks a Spanish outpost against express orders, gets Raleigh's son killed, returns to Raleigh to inform him of this, and promptly commits suicide. None of this is going to help Raleigh, though, because the conditions of his pardon now having been violated he is executed as promised.

> at some point why doesn’t the CTO / CEO / etc. say “I’m going to go have conversations with the workers to get their perspective?”

Why would you when all of the reports you're getting from your managers are 5/5 stars and "everything's great". Once an organization gets large enough, the information that reaches C-suite has been filtered through so many layers that it barely resembles reality anymore, even when you remove malice from the equation.

At my org the CIO knows fuck all about computers. Great guy on a personal level but wouldn't be able to quit Vim even if the lives of his 3 kids depended on it.

He was put there because he was with the company for years before and he led other departments fine.

Since he can't evaluate anything IT related himself he relies on 'advice' from the people beneath him who try to get the most budget for their departments by overstating how important they are.

This layer beneath him is mostly product managers, RTEs etc... (We are SAFE Agile! Developer Velocity, Woohoo!).

They also don't know much about computer and if they do it's very domain specific, such as SAP or so.

These people try to fight for budget by overstating their importance. They demonstrate this by having more apps and more people relying on them.

"Look we handled 2000 support tickets, the company would grind to a halt without us!".

Never mind that having 2000 support tickets is a bad thing. And also mostly caused by their shitty apps.

This keeps going on and on. I have 10 years experience as engineer and wanted to see "the other side" but it's so exhausting.

A few months back a 'privacy officer' asked why the first and last names of our employees were in the Active Directory and ordered them to reduce the privacy risks.

They failed to specify what risks. Couldn't articulate them even when asked. They also didn't say when the risk would've been reduced 'enough'.

The team was panicking as they were now 'non-compliant' with company policy.

I had to intervene personally to make sure this single directive didn't derail our entire company.

> I legitimately don’t understand how companies get to this point

The people who start a company care deeply about the problem they're trying to solve.

The first N employees also care - they're willing to risk working for start-up because they can see the potential and want to help.

But then you hire, say, an accountant. The accountant doesn't care about your mission. You are just another client to them. You need someone to staff the phone or sweep the floors or design the logo or whatever. Why should they care? You're not paying them to care, they're not invested in the company nor its success, and they believe nothing they do for the company will change their personal fortunes.

Then, before you know it, you have a couple of floors filled with people who have no incentive to care.

It is incredibly difficult to run an organisation where everyone is mission driven.

I think a big part of it is that, at some scale, leaders stop lacking access to reality and start lacking incentive to engage with it

> I reflect on that situation from time to time, wondering at which stage you sort of go from expecting to see live demonstrations, to slide shows. I assume it just slowly slips away from you, one at a time until you're stuck in the land of "make believe we have a good product".

I used to work a very small org with an 80+ year old CEO. I feel like half the time the slide decks were unchanged and very little was getting done but I'm not sure the CEO noticed. Given the CEO often sidelined those meetings themselves, by having some bizarre senior moments. So what should be a 30m meeting always became a 2hr+ long one. The guy used to be technical but as you describe it had slipped away from him a long time ago and he had failed to delegate effectively.

Those meetings felt like my real job was just theatre for the boss in some sort of quasi-nursing home stage, where we helped them maintain the illusion they were running an entirely functioning business. I half wonder if in my short time there, I was a mug for actually doing any work.

I suspect it's a dead ringer for Corporate America at any large American company.