> the only important feature of the project management system was that you couldn't assign the same priority to two feature

That is a good idea for a project management system. Force ranking of priorities.

One piece of managment advice I've gotten is to be very careful about what ideas you're throwing out there, because people can very easily get the wrong idea about the priority, and this can get worse as multiple layers get involved.

Decision trees are one of the oldest forms of AI! There are even algorithms to automatically form decision trees, though you don't need ML to have AI.

It's all different forms of monkeystatus games. Humans, like other primates, have an area of the brain which monitors how dominant they are within the pack. Capitalism is all about this brain area. Despite beliefs, it has nothing to do with merit.

And in B2B or B2G you have customers with checklists of features they don't actually need because the person who wrote the checklist is friends with or paid by a particular supplier, or just operating on old information.

That's how you get Windows subsystem for POSIX. Someone in the government had a checklist saying they'd only buy a POSIX compliant operating system, so Microsoft made one. Amusingly, Linux isn't (mostly because who would pay for that certification?)

Absolutely, but I think that just circles back around to the core point made upthread that we need to address the underlying causes of that behavioral pattern. The customers are often subject to some manner of utterly moronic performance metric where ticking off a list of features without applying critical thought is strongly incentivized.

It seems to me to be a behavioral pattern with deep seated cultural roots. How many times have you found someone you were interacting with becoming frustrated or impatient when he couldn't immediately grasp a complex topic? How frequently have you witnessed that directly resulting in corners being cut in order to "just get on with things"? When some plurality of participants are either unwilling to spend the time they have, or are short on time, or both, the careless attitude proceeds to cascade through the network.

The Xbox 360 was called that instead of the Xbox 2, because it was gonna sit on shelves next to the Playstation 3 and MSFT didn't want consumers to look at "2" next to "3".

> Open-source projects often have this problem where you can have dozens of thousands of man-hours poured into a project without a single end-user opinion taken into account.

How is this "a problem"? The reason there are dozens of thousands of hours on an open source project is because the end-users are working on it. Some projects exist solely for someone to work on it (that is, the "working on it" is the "use case"). Open source does not expect or need to make money or get "users", so how people discover or source what they build and how to proceed isn't really a "problem".

I think you're both talking about personality problems:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/opinion/office-work-wfh-b...:

> The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day of the Week

> ...

> Case by case, there may be good reasons for teams to work together in person. As a general rule, though, it turns out that ordering people back to the office full time is a power and status move. It’s a signature strategy of leaders who exhibit narcissistic qualities. They see any kind of remote work as a threat to their authority and admiration. They want to be worshiped at the office altar.

> But our data does show that overall, self-centered leaders tend to struggle with the idea of employees making independent choices about where to work. Psychologists have long suggested that narcissism is like a drug — it leaves people craving a regular supply of attention and validation. Remote work deprives leaders of access to that supply.... When people aren’t in the office, it’s harder to command and control....

I have worked with people who have this attitude ("do the story, now!"). I think it eventually de-motivates people and you get a lot of bare-minimum type work from the development team. There's often a lot of stressful priority shifting as well, that can also encourage people to meet only the minimum requirements.

I interpreted the comment you are responding to as “people want to do what they believe is the right work” rather than simply the mandated work (which they might fundamentally disagree with, directionally). When people have limited agency, apathy increases.

Yup, it happens. Often in service companies. Client paid fox x, y, z, not x2, y, z.

No, you missed the point. The GP was talking about causes for the situation where people are apparently prone to "outsourcing their thinking", resulting in low-effort AI slop being produced by entities that really should know better. The style of management I describe destroys the employee's confidence and agency, so they are much more likely to just submit and blindly accept whatever management/AI/etc. tells them than to do any sort of critical thinking.

I don't know. There's a lot of instances where the first movers lose because they were a bit wrong and others learned from their mistakes.

If “wrong” breaks things, then late is better than early.

The flip side of that is, why spend your finite life in a way that's not enjoyable? If the experience of constantly being under pressure to deliver, to go faster, to work more, to produce more, isn't enjoyable - then it's a waste of a life.

Speed itself isn't the priority. You've got to ask what the direction is. If you're working on a project that is meaningful to you personally (maybe because it is very meaningful to others you care about!) then you'll want it to be done.

> the vast majority of us

Is that a reference to the "live forever" people trying to solve aging?

We aren't improving the world by releasing a firehose of slop. It's possible to use your limited time to destroy or extract value instead of creating it.

> Customers are customers because of capital.

Do you mean that in general, or only in this specific situation?

In general it's obviously not true.

> Management represents the owners (capital.)

Only insofar as any employee represents the owners.

> Any other framing is delusional.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...

The only thing that capitalism brings to hierarchy is an abstraction layer.

You get the same dysfunctions in any organisation where the management levels are staffed by narcissists and sociopaths who need hierarchy to feel a sense of self, and need to enforce it to self-soothe.

There are political structures even more hierarchical than US corporations, and some of them punish status infractions + perceived failures with violence or death.

The problem is the dysfunctional psychology of hierarchy. The more upper levels tend to performative hierarchy and status plays, the worse everything gets.

Sorry but this is some tunnel vision. School cheating was a thing in pre-capitalist societies, because of prestige given by education or just laziness of getting it over with. In a command economy, you can also be pushed for results because of military competition or something like that.

The main alternative to capital is politics. Not saying it's always worse, but then you have to convince people in power to care about the things you care about: such as working in a particular way. Marx himself thought utopian artisanal socialists, building Phalanstères etc. to be basically benevolent idiots. Is intellectual work a value of itself? I myself may be convinced, but voting majorities, political leaders? Not guaranteed.

What's the distinction between capital and money?

Go to their supers and take their job.

I have a good enough relationship with mine that I feel comfortable telling him his code is garbage - AI slop or Meatsack slop doesn't matter.

People don’t typically have to approve and submit their super’s work IME so I’m curious what you mean. If they write you unclear slop emails then constantly bother them for clarification until they fix it.