Doing a Job – The Management Philosophy of Adm. Hyman G. Rickover
This type of philosophy is good but not scalable or efficient.<p>Scalability and efficiency requires well defined specialized roles. Additionally the more specialized and &quot;stupid&quot; each compartmentalized role is... the more efficient and scalable the organization becomes. Heavy Specialization is in fact the root reason for the complexity of civilization in the modern world. Therefore, if the objective is growth and efficiency, management of every organization must seek to organize the hierarchy in a way where each role becomes small and extremely well defined.<p>See McDonald or similar for the huge scalability and efficiency that is brought on by the opposite philosophy of Rickover.<p>Rickovers&#x27; philosophy optimizes for flexibility and creativity at the huge cost of basically zero scalability. This type of philosophy is good for labs and R&amp;D work.<p>In terms of software I currently work at a company that affords this level of flexibility, freedom and ownership. Software Engineers at my company &quot;own&quot; their product and are given full autonomy. But they have to deal with all the politics from other stakeholders and generally spend less time doing actual software.<p>A software engineer allowed to deep dive on a stream of tickets&#x2F;tasks while being defended from non-software related issues by a manager is by far more efficient than one given the responsibility of &quot;ownership.&quot;<p>Literally software engineers at my company are expected to push products to production and cat herd all the required people to make it a reality.<p>What in your mind is a better setup? One where a manager does the cat-herding and the software engineer is given the very small task of just coding? Or One where the software engineer has ownership and responsibility of the entire product and has to manage it all the way to production?