Conversation

This excerpt from Science of Discworld 3, from a chapter titled “A lack of sergeants” somehow resonates in light of builder essay. Loss of capacity for building is the loss-of-sergeants problem.
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Thing is, this is not a world that does its building in sergeant-mode anymore. Either you have the “full-stack” doer who can do everything from ideate to execute (which doesn’t scale well) or you have an algorithmic “sergeant” layer that can scale but only coordinate simple work.
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The Industrial Age formula the sergeant fits into is this: Precondition: army trained to follow orders with steady pay Officer: assessed risks and goals and decides a trench must be dug Sergeant: assigns sections of trench, hands out shovels Infantry grunt: digs, no thinking
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This is WW1 coordination formula. WW2 blitzkrieg coordination formula still needs sergeants, but initiative/creativity devolve down the stack. Sergeants have to act more like resourceful CEOs rather than bark orders. Infantry is not grunts anymore but have to maneuver skillfully.
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Now we’re in late-stage OODA/2-pizza team world. The sergeant is the scrum master running sprints in small teams, not a tactical field commander running dozens of men or a WW1 sergeant lining up lots of cannon fodder.
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I’m in a later stage still... free agents/indie consultants where there are effectively no sergeants. Effective coordination has to emerge, and it rarely dies. Thing about sergeant-based coordination is it is a paycheck-economy paradigm.
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I’m actually decent at sergeant-mode operations. I just don’t *like* doing sergeant-mode work. It is a stressful, thankless role, and has neither the satisfaction of doing something with your hands and saying “I dug that trench” nor claim the idea as “I thought of the trench”
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In civilian world, sergeants morphed first into managers/shift supervisors, and then into clueless middle management layer of taller orgs, getting slowly depressed working coordination problem far removed from either end of the satisfying action — leadership and doing.
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There may be a hard constraint here: complex coordination requires a closed-world condition. It can only happen in layers relatively shielded from risk to the point they can act like algorithms. That’s why so much sergeant work is being reduced to algorithms.
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