Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Recursive Middle Manager Hell, published by Raemon on January 1, 2023 on LessWrong.

I think Zvi's Immoral Mazes sequence is really important, but comes with more worldview-assumptions than are necessary to make the points actionable. I conceptualize Zvi as arguing for multiple hypotheses. In this post I want to articulate one sub-hypothesis, which I call "Recursive Middle Manager Hell". I'm deliberately not covering some other components of his model.

tl;dr:

Something weird and kinda horrifying happens when you add layers of middle-management. This has ramifications on when/how to scale organizations, and where you might want to work, and maybe general models of what's going on in the world.

You could summarize the effect as "the org gets more deceptive, less connected to its original goals, more focused on office politics, less able to communicate clearly within itself, and selected for more for sociopathy in upper management."

You might read that list of things and say "sure, seems a bit true", but one of the main points here is "Actually, this happens in a deeper and more insidious way than you're probably realizing, with much higher costs than you're acknowledging. If you're scaling your organization, this should be one of your primary worries."

The Core Model

Say you have a two-layer company, a CEO and a widgetmaker. The CEO is directly in contact with reality – his company either is profitable or not. He can make choices about high-level-widgetmaking strategy, and see those choices play out in customers that buy his product.

The widgetmaker is also in direct contact with reality – he's got widgets to make. He can see them getting built. He can run into problems with widget-production, see that widgets are no longer getting made, or getting made worse. And then he can fix those problems.

Add one middle manager into the mix.

The middle manager is neither directly involved with widget-production, or the direct consequences of high-level widget strategy. Their feedback loop with reality is weaker. But, they do directly interact with the CEO, and the widgetmakers. So they get exposed to the object level problems of widget-making and company-profit-maximizing.

Hire a lot of widgetmakers, such that you need two middle managers. Now, the middle managers start talking to each other, and forming their own culture.

Scale the company enough that you need two layers of middle-managers. Now there's an upper layer who reports to the CEO, but the things they reports about are "what did the lower-middle-managers tell me?". The lower layer talks directly to the widgetmakers, and reports down what they hear about high level strategy from upper management.

Lower middle management wants promotions and raises. Upper management isn't directly involved with the process of widgetmaking, so they only have rough proxies to go on. Management begins constructing a culture about legible signals of progress, which begin to get goodharted in various ways.

Then, scale the company enough that you have three layers of middle management.

Now, in the center of the hierarchy are people who never talk to someone who's directly engaged with a real-world problem. And there are multiple levels, which create a ladder for career advancement. Middle management culture develops which is about career advancement – people rise through the ranks of that culture if they prioritize career advancement as their goal, trading off against other things. Those people end up in charge of how career advancement happens, and they tend to promote people who are like them.

You can fudge numbers to make yourself look good, and because nobody is in direct contact with the reality, it's hard to tell when the numbers are bullshit. It's really hard to evaluate middle managers, and even if you could, evaluation is expensive. If...