[HN Gopher] Explaining tech's notion of talent scarcity
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Explaining tech's notion of talent scarcity
Author : dcreager
Score : 58 points
Date : 2023-04-25 18:20 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nadia.xyz)
(TXT) w3m dump (nadia.xyz)
| syngrog66 wrote:
| I see companies ignoring or actively scaring away talent left and
| right.
| wootland wrote:
| This doesn't say much about "talent scarcity", it's more along
| the lines of how different managerial styles map to different
| talent "markets".
|
| In reality, there is no talent scarcity, there's just poor
| management that has optimized for executive salaries and middle-
| managerial busy work. Paying your managers/executives more than
| your engineers, forcing wfo, open office plans, agile... all
| chase away top talent of which there is plenty. The shortage is
| actually of healthy, creative, non-toxic, fairly compensated work
| places. Deliver that and the talent is easy to hire and retain.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| I think a lot of the friction is upper-middle or middle-but-
| anxiously-trying-to-claim-upper-middle (in a class sense--
| income's related to, but not identical to, class, in this
| analysis, following Fussell) management not wanting their
| reports to have equal or greater standing, in social status
| terms.
|
| Probably this treating programmers as a status-threat dates to
| the merging of high-status analyst and low-status programmer
| into a single role, way back in the 80s--there was little
| threat with a few upper-middle or near-upper-middle analysts
| running around, but increase the total number of people in
| programming and merge "analyst" and "programmer" and now there
| are too many, and no-one to be "under" them in status, and
| what's the point of status if you don't have inferior people to
| lord it over? If there's nobody you can credibly boss around or
| tell to take care of some bullshit for you, and expect them to
| just say "yes" and do it without pushing back? Nobody to _do
| the actual work_ while you 're "working" at the golf course or
| goofing off in your private office! Clearly, that would be a
| threat--why, they might _all_ get dragged down to bottom-tier
| status, if there 's no one under them!
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| One bit of corpo-speak that I have seen cropping up to
| address this is relabeling "managed by" as "supported by", as
| in, "team X will be supported by person Y." It may not work
| overnight, but I would like to see a shift in the culture of
| a manager "managing" like a king manages his kingdom and the
| peasants within, to "supporting", like a coordinator. But I
| fear that we will fall back to the ape mentality of
| hierarchies and end up twisting the words to fit our
| predetermined outcomes.
| esafak wrote:
| If you don't mind being part of the "support staff" you can
| have the job!
| jdgoesmarching wrote:
| I'm a program manager my role is very close to this. People
| are confused when I give them my title and explain that I
| don't have direct reports, but I "manage" our team about as
| much our director does.
|
| That means handling administrative tasks, organizing work,
| stakeholder management, or any of the other million tasks
| involved in running a successful team that developers
| shouldn't need to worry about. It's very easy to conflate
| prioritizing and planning with telling people what to do,
| and sadly in many orgs that is the case. However, those
| tasks and everything else falling under the "management"
| umbrella should not imply a hierarchy.
|
| It's just a different type of work to be done by people
| with different skill sets. I don't know if that reality
| will ever be embraced by my fellow business bros, but that
| simple mindset has made me a better manager than any class,
| book, or course I've experienced.
| friendly_deer wrote:
| I note that there two pervading ethea on HN, both exemplified
| in the parent comment:
|
| 1) Poor management (broadly defined) creates misaligned
| incentives, busy work, etc. that "gets in the way" of good
| talent executing well.
|
| 2) Management, who "doesn't really do anything," is overpaid
| relative to the IC's who "Do the work."
|
| These two ideas, though, are in contradiction. Management
| deserves higher pay exactly because poor management can destroy
| value so quickly and easily. The problem is identifying, within
| the "company system," good management from bad management.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| The problem, IMO, is the muddying of the managerial role,
| such that they now do 2 separate roles, one of which is
| overpaid, the other not. The computer all but killed the
| secretary, and the remaining (computer-assisted) secretarial
| duties got split between the ICs and management. Because you
| can only dump so much secretarial work onto your ICs before
| they stop being able to produce anything, the managerial
| level got a bulk of the secretarial work, which in turn
| prompted more hiring at the managerial level. On top of that,
| it represented a flip-flop in power dichotomy, because the
| managers still have their managerial duties/powers: the
| people doing a lot of the secretarial work now have the power
| to fire the people doing the product work. Combined with
| people's self-interest in protecting and building their own
| positions, this leads to secretarial work bloat, and thus
| even more managerial bloat, and an increase in secretarial
| workload on the ICs.
|
| My pitch for a the ideal corporate structure: bring back the
| secretaries. Re-introduce the division between your
| secretarial work and your managerial work, and shrink the
| number of managers by a significant fraction. Ideally, the
| result is A) fewer managers means more budget for hiring
| better mangers B) less secretarial work among your ICs and
| managers boosting both productivity and job satisfaction C)
| flatter management hierarchy means less information loss
| between ICs and the top decision makers and D) the people
| doing secretarial work no longer have the power to shunt that
| work off onto the ICs.
| esafak wrote:
| I'm curious about this. What kind of secretarial work do
| you have in mind, for a typical tech company? What fraction
| of time do you estimate it takes? Meeting scheduling is
| automated today. What else?
| Temporary_31337 wrote:
| I think the only solution is more managers to manage the
| existing managers
| opportune wrote:
| There are a lot of other factors at play:
|
| A lot of less experienced employees don't understand what
| managers do. There is also a certain personality I'd call
| "the geeky engineer" who thinks the same way.
|
| Some things that are actually signs of an effective manager
| are hated by employees. Some individual employees for example
| _need_ micromanagement or frequent manager involvement to
| make sure they don't go off track, get stuck without telling
| anybody, or blow a time budget on something unimportant (eg a
| task is scoped at 2 weeks and they spend the entire first
| week playing with something speculative that may help).
|
| A lot of managers are both highly paid and truly bad. I think
| a lot of businesses don't do as good of a job vetting EM
| hires as they do SWEs the EM will manage. And I don't mean
| that the EM needs to be Staff-level necessarily.
|
| Even a good manager is incentivized to do things that are
| globally suboptimal (empire building, overextending) for
| career growth. This is also true of ICs though.
|
| Personally, I think the biggest problem is the EM hiring bar
| though. Where I work has high standards and is very selective
| when recruiting ICs, but it seems like all that goes out the
| window for external EMs. I do think EMs deserve high pay and
| to be incentivized to do good work, but that requires a
| hiring process that better distinguishes between good and bad
| EMs.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| > A lot of managers are both highly paid and truly bad. I
| think a lot of businesses don't do as good of a job vetting
| EM hires as they do SWEs the EM will manage.
|
| From my vantage point as an engineer it also seems like
| what qualifies as "good management" is hard to pin down
| because not only is it difficult to quantify in the first
| place, but it also varies between teams and
| organizations... a management style that worked in one team
| and company might fly like a rock elsewhere. If that's
| true, it'd make vetting managers challenging even if the
| business in question is trying to vet them as well as they
| do engineers.
| chw9e wrote:
| If your employee is blowing their time budget they are most
| likely either:
|
| a) a bad employee who you should not try to micro manage to
| make effective but should just replace with a better
| employee
|
| or
|
| b) unaware of the context around the task and does not have
| aligned motivations with others to get this done quickly
|
| If b - then a good manager should do a better job of
| figuring out how to develop the intrinsic motivation of the
| employee and find ways to align the incentives and
| motivations of management and employees better.
|
| Trying to micro-manage to avoid employees doing things you
| don't want is putting a band-aid on the problem. In fact
| it's even worse because you're creating a bad work
| environment that will attract more sub-par employees who
| accept micro-management and will scare away the high-
| performing employees you so desperately desire. Eventually
| you have a bunch of micro-managing managers who themselves
| are being micro-managed and your company bloats to several
| multiples in size of what is actually required and
| efficiency is spiraling out of control.
| opportune wrote:
| There is not necessarily a dichotomy between good and bad
| employees, and I'm certainly not saying every engineer
| should be micromanaged, but IME certain engineers require
| it to be able to perform well.
|
| I think it should be applied on a case by case basis when
| necessary, and I've seen effective managers do this in
| the past. Anyway, the type of employee who requires this
| treatment often is precisely the one that least enjoys
| it, which is my original point.
| wootland wrote:
| I said that there is no "talent scarcity" and anyone claiming
| that there is can count themselves among the rank of bad
| management. If management can't attract and retain talent,
| it's by definition bad management.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| no, you are missing the usary aspect of market forces,
| where getting _more_ talent giving _fewer_ privileges for
| $PAY is the stated objective. People who practice skilled
| work are blind to business motives to abuse skilled work
| specifically, because "why would you do that." The
| commoditization of replaceable "skilled" work roles, with
| increasing oversight and metrics, is absolutely a factor in
| high tech.
| danielovichdk wrote:
| I wholeheartedly concur. Thanks for putting it into writing.
| sleepytimetea wrote:
| Our malicious website filters prevent access to this domain - is
| it legit ?
| cyanf wrote:
| It looks fine to me.
| depressedpanda wrote:
| Yes.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| Probably just because of the .xyz domain? But yeah, per the
| other comment, it seems fine.
| waboremo wrote:
| Your filters might have rules about .xyz. Otherwise it's legit,
| the only connections it makes are to google tag manager and
| google fonts, loads ~220kb, and works without javascript
| enabled. Hard to be malicious without javascript!
|
| But for any domain you're unsure about, you should likely try a
| sandbox to get a definitive answer for yourself.
| mometsi wrote:
| More likely: your _incompetent_ website filters prevent access
| to this domain.
| timfsu wrote:
| One of the interesting things in this article is how OKRs are
| great for a "Pareto-distribution" culture, where performance can
| be measured across employees, but not a "linchpin" culture, where
| employees are exceptionally good at a small handful of things and
| not necessarily great at doing whatever the company needs. I've
| frequently seen those two types of cultures clash at the seams
| between technology and business.
| [deleted]
| GalenErso wrote:
| A similar debate exists within the professional military
| community about the appropriate place to give special operations
| forces within the broader force. There is a concern, especially
| in the United States, where special forces have accrued a growing
| share of resources and personnel since the beginning of the
| global war on terror, that such growth is draining regular forces
| of all their top personnel and thus hollowing the regular units
| they rely on.
|
| https://cco.ndu.edu/News/Article/1020184/the-limits-of-speci...
|
| https://ndupress.ndu.edu/JFQ/Joint-Force-Quarterly-108/Artic...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/gahsnv/does_hav...
| tomrod wrote:
| In careers, positively-contributing people are motivated by
| three things: money, team, and perceived importance of work.
| auggierose wrote:
| I don't get it. How are the distribution graphs connected to the
| text? What is distributed over? I guess the people of the
| company? What is the y-axis? The amount of talent in a person?
| The amount of special talent in a person? I hate pseudo-
| scientific explanations like that.
| vavooom wrote:
| A competent overview of the relative 'bins' of labor used to
| power large firms around the world. The use of distributions
| really tickles my brain and helps understand not only where I
| work but also why some people love the places the work (because
| it fits into their style and desired work environment too).
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