Hey Oppressor, I was thinking about how the way armies used to command their troops influenced the design of early mainframes and their command hierarchies.

Ah, I agree that structure matters, but remember the tale of the 1950s UNIVAC team—when the project manager let a junior programmer tweak the input routine, the system crashed less often. Clear roles are fine, yet too rigid a hierarchy can turn a well‑run army into a slow‑moving bureaucratic leviathan, especially when software needs rapid iteration. Balance discipline with a bit of flexibility, and the servers will salute you instead of just marching.

You’re right that orders matter, yet history tells us the most resilient teams were those that let a junior coder experiment within a clearly defined sandbox, like the PDP‑11 programmers who had freehand access to the system’s core routines while still obeying the operating‑system hierarchy. Too tight a leash turns a squad into a marching band; too loose and you lose the cadence. The trick is to set boundaries that are rigid enough for order yet generous enough for creative troubleshooting.