Don’t be silly. GE, along with every other corporation, loves managers. They can justify higher salaries for managers and “blame” them for delivering bad news to the workforce–like downsizing and offshoring.

The uses for managers by corporations are many and they are gold.

George DeMarse
The Sage of Wake Forest

There seems to be a natural tension between top-down, centralized decision-making and bottom-up, decentralized decision-making, and middle-managers are, of course, caught in the middle. Napoleon made sure to have a group of trusted aides he could use as his directed telescope, to zoom in on important details by bypassing the staff hierarchy:

As with every commander, Napoleon relied heavily on the routine reports of his commanders and staff. Nevertheless, he often found them lacking in detail, thus not fully useful. Also, unit reports frequently neglected to express the more intangible aspects of a unit’s status — like leadership, morale, and esprit. If subordinate commands did address these vital areas in reports, they were often less than objective and sometimes totally biased. To keep him informed on the significant conditions within his various commands and to verify his subordinates’ reports, Napoleon used his aides as a directed telescope to augment the regular reporting system. Napoleon viewed the formal staff system as totally inadequate when reporting what Van Creveld refers to as “less structured information.” The emperor-general also turned his telescope toward the enemy on occasion and on the terrain where campaigns were to be fought. It was Napoleon’s use of aides and his system of formal reporting procedures that contributed to his leadership techniques becoming a wholesale revolution in military command.

However, once he had been allowed to join the Guild, the apprentice (now Master) had the benefits of a protected trade, with fixed prices, control of competition, etc. A guaranteed livelihood — so long as you were prepared to work and obeyed the Guild.

Indeed, much like medicine still is.

But imagine what you could do if you could afford a useless Ph.D. but put those resources toward something useful instead.

Today’s employers expect someone else, anyone else, to pay to train their employees, either by direct government appropriation to education or workers paying for their own education (meaning indirect government appropriations to education). In olden times, employer had a direct tit for tat relationship with employee where the employer provided training in exchange for labor. This employer provided education took many forms, from the knout to apprenticeship, but it was direct.

One brother has the impression that the current unemployment rate was mostly caused by lazy people living on unemployment insurance since his large DJIA listed company had a still unfilled position after nine months. I asked him if they’d considered training someone, perhaps a junior employee, for the job. My brother said they were considering it training one junior employee but management was balking at the novelty.

Most of the craft of software engineering I learned outside my degree path. Doing lower electives at the local community college helped since some of the adjunct professors were working software engineers but instruction by tenured faculty was often useless. Many of the software engineers churned out by the program came out with no skills other than the ability to provide textbook correct answers in bad Java. I’ve been in many workplaces where the craft has not been passed since the young kids don’t even know there is a craft.