Yeah, that can be tricky. Under a previous manager where mostly he was ignored and I worked straight with the middle management, I had gotten the hang of the people inflicting the politics and crap and was significantly able to directly counter it to avoid spurious bullshit.

Then when that manager got laid off, and I got a new "I'll shield you" manager, who largely just takes whatever crap he's told and passes it on and says it's better to just take it than risk making waves. So I end up having to waste more time than I used to.

But absolutely was valuable in an early manager who took on the politics direct while I just did my work in early career. Of course he got fired for keeping documentation on a certain executive making a terrible call and actually sharing it with the senior leadership team when that terrible call went bad. Senior executives canned the executive, but let him fire the manager on the way out. Guess if there's one thing worse than an executive incurring risk, it's a snitch.

Problem being, lots of middle managers got the job via The Peter Principal. My last boss landed the role that way. He's an astonishing devops guy and one of the 5 smartest humans I've ever known, but he cannot manage people.

Quit my job at Lowe's when it became apparent the regional theft prevention manager hated me. GM passed me in the store and said I better watch it with her as he couldn't protect me. Loved the three guys above me, but I was out a couple of hours after hearing that.

what about his manager?

so they don’t have to deal with them

Yep, that’s the entire purpose of middle management. Making sure the c-suite doesn’t have to interact with the plebes.

But yeah for early game, it seems like a simple solution, and the answer is proper delegation instead of a free-for-all.

That's the problem. Humans would each gravitate to what they do best and organise themselves into a structure relatively quickly.

LLMs get stuck in circular patterns because they don't have the ability to do that. They can't think outside the box. None of them arbitrarily becomes the boss to take charge. They're all yes men stuck in endless board meetings where even just flipping a coin would break the deadlock. But they are incapable of realising that, because they are just statistical regurgitation machines flavoured with a bit of randomness on the most probable outputs.

I think the point of having something that should be able to do stuff autonomously, is that it should be able to define these things by itself. Or at least the value of it would be in it being able to do it. But would giving up control be what the ones in control want to do? I wonder if that is also one of the things that keeps the corporations from getting any closer to more functional llm that isnt just a brainless yesman.