> If you can get away with it, why wouldn't you set things up this way?

Ethics and morality.

> You can't try to view power plays like this through the lenses of ethics or morality.

Yes, you can, that's the entire point of ethics and morality.

> The point is to use rules to bind and punish your enemies and to make sure that only your friends can get away with breaking them.

Well, yes, that's the point of the specific actions being discussed; that doesn't make it impossible to look at them through a lens of ethics and morality, it just makes them look bad through such a lens.

Perhaps rather than "can't try to view" it's more accurate to say that it's an ineffective lense to try to understand the motivations and dynamics at play. You can, and should, analyse the ethics of just about everything in order to make value judgements. Those judgements just have very little to do with people's motivations, and to assume a principled moral stance on the part of an observed actor will leave you baffled more often than enlightened.

Power is less appealing if you aren't seeking to abuse it. I agree that an ethics and morality lens is both useful and necessary, but I fear it doesn't illuminate the actions and motivations of the powerful. Perhaps in contrast or relief, but not directly.

You want a better outcome.

Culture transmission is more effective when followers can emulate leaders — so you’ll have an easier time getting people to obey when your goal is to get them to act the way you do. In this case, you’ll expend less political capital on enforcing your policy regarding code reviews and testing if you adhere to the same policy. (And accordingly, have an easier time avoiding disgrace like public failures if your service.)

If you want to view it purely through the lens of power politics, saving your political capital on issues like this preserves it for things with better rewards — eg, you’ll have an easier time getting your projects approved if your manager isn’t constantly having to deal with the fallout of your policy double standards impacting morale. Or for setting a standard that working fewer hours is acceptable if you’re meeting your quotas — which nobody can dispute you’re doing, as the whole teams is validating that you are.

This kind of petty power game is rarely an optimal exercise of power.

I think it's more likely a trust issue. He didn't trust the other devs to push things directly, but ofc he trusts himself. I do this with somethings myself. But I also do the inverse, where I don't want to trust myself so I setup a bunch of checks and tests to save my future self from my present self

I think when you're the 'architect' or know the full stack very well, to where you fully repl/grok it and occasionally need to do hot patch type work, the former approach is nice. But, my brain has limited memory and time erodes quickly, so I also know when to rely on the latter approach and I try to do it as much as possible

That's a real difference when something is your final responsibility too (as team lead or an architect). You think of it differently, you predict and anticipate changes better. It's like taking care of your kid vs your kids friend.

I think he could have just been a bit lazy.

That’s the definition of authoritarianism.