i’m not the person you responded to, and i want to be careful not to put words in their mouth, but if i’m reading them properly and from the many talks i’ve had with Anarchist friends, they would explain that as something like:

we should be striving to, when building these systems (building a business/organization/etc…) to try our best to put a bit more emphasis on not discarding the concerns of the people doing the work. an example would be, management often gets disconnected, siloed, or tunnel visioned in their thinking.

for example, an executive might not understand why an engineer sitting in meetings 90% of the time might be frustrated and why this might be hampering forward momentum. and then, executives when looking at another metric might question “our code is not up to par, why are engineers not producing?” they may never connect the dots that the executives caused the whole thing from the start.

if the business/org had built into its design where engineers/developers doing the work had more of a voice and felt more comfortable using it so their concerns can actually be heard, those kinds of tensions could be more easily addressed and solve entire classes of issues.

while i can see both sides here, i tend to agree with the Anarchist position more, both for productivity and for the overall mental health of those doing the more grunt style work.

i’ve worked in both large projects and mid/small projects and one of things that i can point to as a constant—if you give people more freedom/ownership of a project: they’re going to feel much better about it, they’re going to work harder to complete it, and they’re going to communicate and figure out clever ways to address underlying issues that may stand in the way. they’re going to feel actual pride in what they helped build.

and an opposite constant is: the more alienated someone is, the less ownership they feel over something—the less they give a shit. at this point their work devolves closer to “just a paycheck.” not only is this incredibly unhealthy for the project, but it makes the people doing the actual work feel worse/unfulfilled. i would argue (and Anarchists seem to as well) this alienation manifests in all kinds unhealthy ripple effects in society.

tldr, we should be putting more emphasis on the actual engineers/workers overall happiness levels and give them more ownership of their work. also, when i say “ownership” don’t limit your thinking to “capital ownership.”

Anarchists, if im misinterpreting, feel free to chime in and correct me.