[HN Gopher] Organization probably doesn't want to improve things
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Organization probably doesn't want to improve things
Author : l0b0
Score : 465 points
Date : 2023-10-08 00:48 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ludic.mataroa.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (ludic.mataroa.blog)
| rvba wrote:
| > I have never met a single manager at any large company that has
| not said they want to be data driven.
|
| Grinding Gear Games - developers of Path of Exile famously said
| that they dont use data (probably because they dont know how to
| interpret it) - explains why their game is very poorly balanced.
|
| On a side note, everyone knows that the game is infested by
| bots... everyone apart from GGG. There was a post by them, where
| they noted how it was strange that 15% of players did not make a
| certain quest... Guess what: bots (at that time) werent advanced
| enough to make that quest.
| laurels-marts wrote:
| > 90% of everything is crud, and that explains almost everything.
|
| > Here's the pressure if you're in the 10% of people that aren't
| crud at their jobs - you're surrounded by people that are crud.
|
| I wish people stopped overusing crud. It kind of dilutes the
| argument and makes it less clear.
| otteromkram wrote:
| I love how the author is just too busy solving problems brought
| about by idiots (not him, of course), but never mentions solving
| problems via:
|
| 1. Improving dashboard engagement through awareness. Maybe
| through something like periodic email blasts that showcase
| metrics from the dashboards.
|
| 2. Mentoring some of the subpar engineers to help them improve so
| that future issues ebb and overall quality increases.
|
| But, no, the author is too smart for that nonsense...
| paulsutter wrote:
| There are companies reshaping their industries. They are fast
| growing and staffed by smart people who care about making an
| impact
|
| This is the right website to find them
| aiunboxed wrote:
| I believe the issue isn't necessarily with the organization
| itself, but rather with the inherent nature of most individuals
| who may not actively seek improvement or introspection. Many
| people tend to gravitate towards comfort and familiarity,
| resisting change even when it's beneficial
|
| After all, an organization is ultimately a reflection of its
| people.
|
| Sometimes people need direction and for that direction having a
| visionary leadership team and having strong middle managers
| become extremely necessary.
| isthispermanent wrote:
| This is my thinking, people hate change. It explains so much of
| human behavior.
|
| Natural selection would say that those that can handle change
| well are the ones whose genes will likely carry on. But that
| does not mean that they _want_ to handle change.
| ayx wrote:
| Sturgeon's law really does apply. It applies to doctors,
| plumbers, therapists, programmers, managers, x.
|
| There really is too much stupidity in the world. "Obviously".
|
| Learning to ignore it is an easy but reasonable response.
| Accepting it however, and learning that most stupidity can be
| dispelled with a bit of guidance is much harder.
|
| You can get there if you aren't stupid. :)
| alphazard wrote:
| I often think about the huge amount of economic displacement that
| would occur if organizations had a detector which could determine
| who was in the 80 vs the 20. I don't think the world knows what
| to do with all the imposters in tech alone, let alone white
| collar jobs broadly.
|
| We might wake up tomorrow to a startup marketing just such a
| detector. It certainly doesn't require AGI to determine who is
| adding value. Everything is online now, patterns of git commits,
| slack communications, call transcripts. It's totally feasible
| that AI can figure out who is good at solving problems before it
| can solve those problems directly.
| uoaei wrote:
| Not all benefit is quantifiable. There's that anecdote about
| the guy who wasn't a superstar by metrics but sat with all the
| high performers at lunch and gave them useful info and asked
| the right questions to help them achieve great things. I think
| it was Nyquist at Bell Labs?
| Guvante wrote:
| I agree with the core point of the article but the bit about
| unused bar charts reminded me of a weird reality.
|
| You don't know the bar charts you need when you make them. Not in
| a "you didn't do enough research" way (waterfall isn't the
| solution to everything) but instead in a "until it breaks no one
| notices" fashion.
|
| Sometimes a chart points to an exact problem. You may only look
| at that chart once every other year but if 1/10 it avoids an
| outage that is a win for the chart.
|
| The problem is knowing which charts work like that vs which ones
| are superfluous.
| Niksko wrote:
| Thanks for writing this, it's incredibly cathartic to know that
| I'm not alone in feeling this way.
|
| Question for the audience: are there places where it isn't like
| this? Can anyone attest to having worked in places like the one
| that the author describes, and then escaping to somewhere that
| isn't like that? If so, are you hiring? Or should I just be
| content with spending 2 or so years somewhere and then moving on?
| (2 years seems to be about the natural amount of time it takes
| for me to fully realize the dysfunction of wherever I'm currently
| employed)
| ornornor wrote:
| I feel the same way, been in that occupation for over a decade
| now, have worked with over a dozen companies in that timeframe
| (consulting or full time)... I have _never_ experienced a sane
| environment where a psychopath isn't in charge. I sincerely
| don't think it exists.
|
| I haven't found the solution you're looking for. I've refused
| to go back to the grindstone for about two years now. Exploring
| other avenues such as bizdev because I don't think I'm
| physically capable of remaining healthy and being an employee
| software engineer anymore.
|
| I think the prime quality for the vast majority of software
| developers isn't technical skill but rather whether you can
| settle/give up on your ideals and just drive the bus into the
| wall whenever asked. If you can't do that (I can't), pick
| another occupation and keep the programming as a side gig thing
| because it'll drive you insane and shave years off your life.
| Niksko wrote:
| > I don't think I'm physically capable of remaining healthy
| and being an employee software engineer anymore
|
| I'm sorry to hear that, and that makes me worry about my
| future in this industry.
|
| However
|
| > If you can't do that (I can't), pick another occupation and
| keep the programming as a side gig thing because it'll drive
| you insane and shave years off your life.
|
| Won't this just apply to any career? Or do you think there's
| something unique about software that leads to this?
|
| > Exploring other avenues such as bizdev
|
| I don't think I fully understand what this entails, can you
| elaborate?
| ornornor wrote:
| > Won't this just apply to any career?
|
| To some extent, yes. I think SE is a little special in the
| sense that our job is very taxing mentally but we get very
| little respect for it. We are considered and managed like
| assembly line workers, expected to hit absurd deadlines or
| objectives while being given absolutely no control over the
| factors influencing these (must work fast, quality be
| damned; strategy and roadmaps are decided for us instead of
| with us; we tend to be pushovers and not stand for
| ourselves). We're also expected to work like cogs in noisy
| open space environments with interruptions all day when our
| work requires intense focus.
|
| Most of us (at least on here) wanted to become SE because
| we enjoy writing code, finding elegant solutions to
| difficult problems, and delivering reasonably robust
| software. The big mismatch is that it's not what the
| industry wants: instead the industry wants cheap and fast,
| nevermind the resulting dumpster fire and constant panic.
| As a SE you're at the bottom of the food chain, anything
| that goes wrong is your responsibility but you're not
| allowed to address the root cause for it not to reoccur.
|
| We basically do a very abstract, intellectual job but are
| managed and considered as if we were just laying bricks in
| an assembly line.
|
| The cognitive dissonance and low grade permanent stress is
| what makes so many of us burnt out so badly after 10-15
| years in the industry.
|
| Of course this is a generalization. You can be insanely
| lucky and have amazing management, at a company that's not
| so dysfunctional, and have a happy 30-40 years career. But
| that's very very rare in my experience. I've worked across
| North America and Europe, had many jobs at many companies,
| and I've _never_ come across such a work environment.
| However, I have dozens of burnt out SEs in my network of
| all skill levels, backgrounds, company size, etc.
|
| > bizdev
|
| This is more sales oriented. The earning potential is high
| because it's partly commission based so the more you sell
| the more you make as the company makes 10x more. Having a
| technical background helps because you can talk shop with
| technical people on the client's side and better understand
| what they need and if your company can provide it at all.
|
| I'm sure it has downsides as well, but the thought of being
| a salaried SE again makes me physically sick and I don't
| want to throw away my decade + of tech experience. So
| that's the avenue I'm exploring at the moment to see if it
| suits me better.
|
| Overall, and whatever you end up doing, know that burn out
| is prevalent in our industry. Keep your costs very low so
| you can save 70-80% of your paycheck and retire early
| and/or afford to not work for a long while if you need to.
| jb_gericke wrote:
| So TL/DR, the author works for a large org with a less than
| perfect culture? I'd simply move. Even in keeping to companies of
| similar scale, there are definitely highly successful enterprises
| out there that wouldn't entertain entire departments doing
| meaningless work, and have a generally good culture of
| accountability and feedback. This before even considering smaller
| businesses and startups where there's simply no room to have
| these sorts of inefficiencies.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| I feel this is one of the most interesting tradeoffs of the
| modern day. No, seriously.
|
| Imagine the kind of flexibility an ordinary person has to build
| into everything else they have going on to make "I'd just move"
| a viable long term strategy. Buying property immediately
| becomes way more hassle than it's worth, because you might have
| to move in 6 months to the next place anyway. Providing a
| stable schooling situation for your kids just became a lot
| harder. Want to avoid those issues? Are you willing to pay for
| rent or a mortgage in a city large enough where you can keep
| running this strategy, over and over again? What about the
| situation where the culture is actually fine, but you yourself
| just want more money or more responsibility than they're
| willing to pass down to you? It's an interesting example of how
| when you hold one thing fixed in place, everything else has to
| orbit around it. Very few people get to have it all without
| putting in a lot of work to get there first.
|
| Like a lot of societal ills, I think this is one place where
| remote working is going to make things a lot better for people
| even while a vocal minority will bemoan how it's all worse than
| ever. Many, many, many talented people would be _thrilled_ to
| live in a world where they can live in the same gorgeous small
| town in the middle of nowhere they call home while also feeling
| like they aren 't running a serious risk of unemployment if
| they give up the one job they managed to claw out of the
| aether.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| I think that by "move", they meant "to another employer",
| versus "to another home"
| rgblambda wrote:
| >Actually remove the staff that no one works to work with or who
| terrorize their subordinates and I'll know you're serious about
| performance.
|
| Unfortunately, that sort of person is great at convincing
| managers that they're the top performing employee in the team,
| and it's better for the others to just put up with them.
| l0b0 wrote:
| Working at a medium-size government org, 6 years into a reorg,
| with projects being cancelled after _two years_ because nobody
| actually needs it, dropping rebuilds because they _might_
| overrun, not hiring anybody who actually has a background
| relevant to the original system so that it can be maintained, not
| allotting any devs to groups which desperately need a code monkey
| to automate things, then assigning a senior to be that code
| monkey, security having all the clout and no thought for just how
| miserable they make everybody 's lives, [omitted for brevity].
| Yep, dysfunctional is about right.
| isthispermanent wrote:
| I can't imagine the infosec, security department puts a moment
| of thought into the lived experience of dealing with all the
| security. And I get it, it is important, but I often think to
| myself that it seems like they don't want me to get any work
| done and that must be why they put all these security hoops in
| front of me. I must spend an hour+ a day logging in and out of
| things, and then another hour waiting for security checks on a
| deploys.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Security like that is how companies end up with shadow IT and
| private State Department e-mail servers.
| Arbortheus wrote:
| This comment has made me appreciate my company's security
| team and their pragmatism and effective prioritisation. Thank
| you :)
| cratermoon wrote:
| > not hiring anybody who actually has a background relevant to
| the original system so that it can be maintained, not allotting
| any devs to groups which desperately need a code monkey to
| automate things, then assigning a senior to be that code monkey
|
| An example of saying one thing and really meaning another, in
| organizations, is when they bring a tech Expert or Very Senior
| person in that tech on the grounds of needing a person to shore
| up their team, but then assigning that Very Senior some code
| monkey tasks. Of course the organization doesn't want to make
| any changes the Expert recommends, but by hiring that person
| they can claim they are addressing issues. Of course, it also
| gives management someone to blame and fire if (when) things go
| south.
| pdimitar wrote:
| > _An example of saying one thing and really meaning another,
| in organizations, is when they bring a tech Expert or Very
| Senior person in that tech on the grounds of needing a person
| to shore up their team, but then assigning that Very Senior
| some code monkey tasks._
|
| Happened to me about 2 years ago, and it was my shortest
| contract ever. Lasted 3 months.
|
| And it was not my imagination, I was complimented and groomed
| into thinking they are hiring an expert to help them with
| difficult problems. Immediately after I made one huge PR
| (120-ish files diff) that helped them resolve a very thorny
| problem, and after it was approved by the CTO and several
| other seniors, and after I was complimented of the quality of
| my work... I got reassigned to a new project where I was
| ordered to pull tickets and not even formulate tasks, and to
| just "do what I am told".
|
| I didn't even last two months when put in that position. Me
| and the CTO very quickly hated each other and he started
| acting like he never said the things he did during the
| interviews, and me leaving was a relief for everyone, myself
| the most.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Exactly what happened to me, but lasted 6 months. If the
| middle of the contract hadn't fallen over the US holiday
| season, when everyone kind of went into a holding pattern
| because some industries are just that way, it's entirely
| possible the contract would have been just 3 months.
|
| The organization, at some level, clearly never wanted me to
| solve the issues I was supposedly brought in to address,
| but give them cover to say they hired help. After some
| reflection, I'm starting to think the project was never
| really expected to succeed in any significant way. The
| company claimed they were trying to build an in-house
| replacement for a third party system the vendor no longer
| supported, but it's possible they just wanted a stop-gap
| while they found another turn-key vendor. The interim
| system didn't have to be all that good, it just had to have
| enough structural integrity to carry the organization over
| the gap.
| pdimitar wrote:
| I thought of that and tried to reflect myself but in the
| end I couldn't decipher their motivation. It was either
| (1) I solved a big problem they wanted quicker than they
| thought and they had no idea what to do with me after, or
| (2) they lied to me that I did well, concluded I am no
| good and funneled me to a team where I was managed like
| an intern.
|
| No clue either way but it was not okay to not
| communicate. It seems they still needed the manpower so
| they figured they will not say anything at all and hope
| that I will stay. Well, it didn't work for them. I was
| happy to leave, lol.
|
| And sorry it happened to you as well. The motivations of
| companies when hiring are still foreign to me and I have
| to catch up there and learn a lot because I hate being
| blindsided like that.
| maxslch wrote:
| They really don't, for a programmer there are million
| opportunities todo something at a smaller scale, on your own etc.
| If you're a product manager than the job itself only exists in
| inefficient corporations. corporations don't take risks, they're
| slow etc. look at google, how many exciting things did they push
| out over the last decade? and how many do we use today?
|
| the thing these corporations are good at is control and
| marketing, they're everywhere and people always think first about
| them when searching for a job etc. they also pay the most, but
| you'll waste your potential there with endless titles etc. In a
| startup/your own project you can do everything yourself, learn
| anything, go into any direction you want to.
|
| All it takes is a mindful shift in thinking, look deeper into
| what you want, what will fulfill you etc, but seems like most or
| a large number of people opt for not thinking stuff through and
| go with the easiest, most popular and obvious choice, it's like
| going to a factory to stand X hours near the machine...
| morphicpro wrote:
| My career in house started at around 2011. I did only contracting
| before that starting at around 2004. I used to hate contract work
| because at the time I was very new and was heavily invested in
| academics. I really just wanted to work in a team environment. I
| had a strong desire to work directly with my peers so that I
| could learn the trade. After I got my first real in house job I
| loved it for about the first 5 years. Then I kept growing in my
| career and moving to larger companies where "scrum master" was a
| title. I hated everything about programming from there on because
| the job became about constantly trying to measure something
| useless while also doing it differently every new try...
|
| As of last 3 months I have completely stop working in tech. I
| will only ever come back to tech as a contractor. I'm rebuilding
| my personal site to go as a consultant and contractor only from
| here on. I'm literally pulling down my resume today so that I
| stop getting harassed by these stupid recruiter Indian call
| centers.
|
| I will never willing work in a corporate hell scrape again and if
| I choose to it will be on my terms.
|
| I honestly think if this blog post resonated with you, you should
| just go work for yourself. It's far more rewarding even if its
| harder work to be your own boss. Good riddance to complacency and
| incompetence!
| addicted wrote:
| > My current organization has 8000 staff members, and I used to
| glance over the usage metrics of the dashboards my old team
| produced. I believe three dashboards were used, out of somewhere
| around 50 - 100. Of those being visited, it usually turned out
| they were being visited by members of our team checking to see if
| the data had refreshed for the day. I'd estimate the cost of
| maintaining our team was approximately $1,000,000, for an
| organization that supposedly can't afford to waste that money.
|
| I'm not sure how to explain this, but often when I find posts on
| HN linking to an engineer discussing how management is doing it
| wrong (especially if it's someone who's not running a successful
| company themselves), there's usually a hyperfocus on really
| insignificant numbers as evidence of their point.
|
| This company has 8000 employees. And the cost of maintaining
| those dashboards is about $1mm according to the post.
|
| It only takes someone in management to identify a change which
| improved employee efficiency by $125 annually to completely pay
| for the $1mm spent to maintain the dashboard.
|
| Identify a new $125 efficiency improvement every year, and by
| year 5 your $1mm annual expense is saving you $5mm every year.
| ludicity wrote:
| It's slightly more complicated, and the numbers are somewhat
| obfuscated to hide my actual employer. You're right that these
| numbers are not a huge deal - that much is obvious, or we
| wouldn't be wasting that money.
|
| What is more relevant to the average reader is that we have a
| large department in this space, and almost all (not all) the
| work is pointless _because_ the numbers just don 't matter at
| this scale. We have a core business that generates amounts of
| money large enough to fund departments that do nothing other
| than reaffirm that we care about whatever that department is
| supposed to do. That's totally fine (though I doubt it's a
| deliberate strategy) _unless_ you waste time thinking they want
| to make people read the dashboards. It turns out that it 's
| totally irrelevant to anything - they just want to have the
| team there to say they care about data, and you'll go insane if
| you try to do your job better.
|
| (Excellent critique though.)
| aeturnum wrote:
| But again - isn't the antithesis of this that the company
| never does the work to look into any of this and, in doing
| so, misses a huge but non-obvious problem that these tools
| might reveal? So you need to build it to do the work and
| check, and then you need to maintain it (because you already
| built it and the possibility still exists, etc, etc)....
|
| Like, absolutely, there's some impossible to define line
| below which the org does not care about the data. But also
| there's probably a point where they would care! Being data
| driven is not about spending all of your energy optimizing
| for exactly the scenario you have data to optimize for (see:
| the post-covid logistic crisis).
|
| To me - it seems like you need to "waste" a certain amount of
| money tracking down problems that don't happen to exist - but
| you can't know for sure they didn't exist before you tracked
| them down.
|
| I guess like...do you have the impression the data should
| drive people in a direction they are not going? Like...if the
| systems you work on are saying things are ok aren't they ok?
| jt2190 wrote:
| That's true from a top-down corporate perspective, but this
| blog post is addressing the perspective of an individual on
| the team, who is repeatedly told that the company really
| cares about data, and then can't seem to understand why
| serious problems with the data are just ignored.
| aeturnum wrote:
| I don't think that's actually what it says though! The
| blog post talks about how no one looks at the data
| (implying that the data is not used) and it separately
| talks about the inconsistent and disconnected ways that
| companies allocate funds. It does not, that I could tell,
| actually say the metrics work has revealed data the
| company is ignoring. Obviously if they are that's
| different from what I said!
| 015a wrote:
| I think this highlights the big difference between being
| Data Driven versus Data Reactive. If a dashboard surfaces a
| strategy problem; you're reacting to data. If you're
| forming strategy based on a dashboard; you're being driven
| by data.
| watwut wrote:
| Company does look onto this. And those queries have pretty
| much zero results and just waste additional money.
| nerdponx wrote:
| This. It's like arguing that we are wasting time with
| application logs because 99% of devs aren't reading them.
| They aren't there for your pleasure, they are there
| because, the one time you actually need them, you'll be
| sorry they _aren 't_ there.
| [deleted]
| pault wrote:
| Are you hiring? I'm looking for a job that will allow me to
| explore my passions. My passions are: video games, anime, and
| watching youtube videos about video games and anime.
| astrange wrote:
| If you enjoy anime I can't think you'd get much enjoyment
| out of the horrifying low quality of anime YouTubers. They
| certainly don't seem to like it much.
|
| One of the most popular channels is called Trash Taste in
| an attempt to act like it's all foreign oriental nonsense
| they're wallowing in.
|
| (Although to be fair, the current anime trend is "guy who
| hates women gets transported to a fantasy novel where he
| gets a sex slave", and the previous trend was "incest
| romance".)
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Can anyone here look at " _identify a change which improved
| employee efficiency by $125 annually_ " and think it isn't
| going to be complete bullshit? That's in the region of 50c/day.
| "I told employees to reuse paperclips which I predict will save
| the company $1M per year"[1] PR/marketing/self-promotion -
| surely nobody believes it?. And that saving 50 cents per day is
| supposed to come from a manager who can influence all 8000
| employees, but who doesn't think to axe the useless reporting
| department to save $1M/year in one go? And then the company
| which keeps a $1M department just to sound good is going to
| identify $1M in piecemeal efficiency improvements year on year,
| every year?
|
| Who believes this?
|
| Although I don't completely disagree, see[2][3] " _Another
| reason to have in-house expertise in various areas is that they
| easily pay for themselves, which is a special case of the
| generic argument that large companies should be larger than
| most people expect because tiny percentage gains are worth a
| large amount in absolute dollars. If, in the lifetime of the
| specialist team like the kernel team, a single person found
| something that persistently reduced TCO by 0.5%, that would pay
| for the team in perpetuity, and Twitter's kernel team has found
| many such changes._ "
|
| But then again, at the bottom of [4] " _At multiple companies
| that I 've worked for, if you tally up the claimed revenue or
| user growth wins [of people claiming they improved things X
| amount per year] and compare them to actual revenue or user
| growth, you can see that there's some funny business going on
| since the total claimed wins are much larger than the observed
| total._" which is pretty much my criticism of your comment;
| people will embellish their claims, especially when nobody can
| easily prove or disprove a claimed 50cent/day efficiency
| improvement over 8000 employees.
|
| > " _usually a hyperfocus on really insignificant numbers as
| evidence of their point._ "
|
| $1M is roughly an average UK household income, after tax, for a
| _lifetime_. This just reads like dismissive boasting rather
| than a useful part of your comment. If it 's "really
| insignificant" why do you then argue that the company will be
| motivated to save it in a more difficult piecemeal fashion,
| year after year five times over, if they aren't motivated to
| save it once in a big lump?
|
| [1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-442813/Dragons-
| Den-...
|
| [2] https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/
|
| [3] https://danluu.com/in-house/
|
| [4] https://danluu.com/people-matter/
| jpc0 wrote:
| I think you would be surprised how many senior leadership
| figures will make decisions to say "yeah we have that" to
| friends and stakeholders.
|
| AI is one of the big things you can see right now.
|
| "Hey we need our chatbot to be AI powered"
|
| "The one that has like 5 users a month and costs far too much
| money, we should pay an engineer to work on AI for that?"
|
| "Yep that one, X said it's the new trend and will improve our
| customer relations"
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I agree with pretty much everything you say here. But a
| thought hits me on the dan luu kernel issue - let's say we
| fund a team of kernel devs and they reduce TCO by .5% - the
| nature of FOSS means that the reduction in cost is illusory -
| all their competitors get the same TCO.
|
| The funding of the kernel team is similar to paying taxes to
| fund science research ... it's just the more I look around
| the more I see a vast socialist society we live in that we
| think is some red in tooth and claw capitalism.
|
| The main value of capitalism seems to be the creative
| destruction- replacing old inefficient companies with ones
| newly formed, built differently.
|
| It's just that if we found a way to close down companies
| after say ten years and forced them to build new, would that
| solve as many issues as schumpter?
| ralferoo wrote:
| EDIT: actually, re-reading the parent post after posting
| this, I'm now not sure if I'm agreeing with him in arguing
| with the GP or disagreeing with him. But either way, I'll
| leave my comment here to try to explain the thinking behind
| $1m being insignificant to a company.
|
| The point isn't whether $1m is significant to an individual
| employee. It would make a massive difference to almost any
| employee on a personal level (except maybe for C level in
| massive companies), but in a company with 8000 employees, $1m
| is a rounding error. Even looking at the example you quoted
| for the average UK income (currently PS33400), for 8000
| employees that's PS267m or $323m just in salaries. When you
| consider all the other costs of running a business on top of
| that like buildings, light, heating, expenses (generally
| accepted wisdom is that a salary is about 50% of the overall
| cost for each employee), then factor in the material costs
| for whatever the company is doing, that $1m really is
| insignificant in the grand scheme of things _from the company
| 's perspective_.
|
| Average US salaries are higher than the UK at around $59k,
| and tech salaries are obviously higher, and in the US even
| more disproportionately so, making this $1m saving even less
| significant to the company.
|
| The middle section of your post "If, in the lifetime of the
| specialist team like the kernel team, a single person found
| something that persistently reduced TCO by 0.5%, that would
| pay for the team in perpetuity" seems to be arguing a
| different point. It's not about whether saving the company
| $1m a year is worth bothering with or not, it's whether
| paying for a team that might cost $500k per year and can
| produce $1m per year in savings and/or revenue is worthwhile.
| Obviously, it is worth keeping the team as the ROI on their
| work is 100%. However the decision on whether to create that
| team in the first place is harder to justify because there is
| probably a more lucrative opportunity for the company to find
| - if the company is currently making e.g. 7% profit doing
| what it's doing, it probably makes far more sense to expand
| production capacity to increase total revenue as that will be
| be more significant to the bottom line than a small project
| that saves $1m.
| DonsDiscountGas wrote:
| Or increase sales from $1B to $1.001B, or increase efficiency
| of 1,000 of those employees by $1,000. If literally nobody is
| viewing a dashboard then it's probably useless, but even a
| small number of views could have very high value.
|
| Other possibility: I had a non-programmer friend who worked at
| BigCo and worked hard for 2 months out of the year, doing
| nothing the other 10 months. He asked his boss for stuff to do
| and the boss said "just try to look busy". Seems like a good
| case for outsourcing, but that 2 months of work was pretty
| important and in-house employees will generally be more
| reliable and knowledgeable (about the company specifically). So
| really they were being paid (not much btw) for the 2 months of
| work and spend the rest of the time being prepared. This was an
| extreme and obvious case but I suspect this type of thing is
| pretty common, just usually people get busy-work (eg "make this
| BI dashboard") rather than being told "try to look busy".
| fbdab103 wrote:
| I think there is something to be said for having sufficient
| staff to handle peak capacity. If you run a lean ship, you
| are likely to run into situations where existing resources
| cannot handle the demand and/or headcount attrition leaves
| you with a gap. It takes months to onboard someone and make
| them productive.
|
| The flip side of that is the peons are not told the company
| over-hired and the headcount are being paid "just in case".
| Which leads to corporate shenanigans where BS work
| materializes to make people feel busy.
| zoomablemind wrote:
| It only takes someone in management to realize that you
| increase the revenue by selling more of an existing product or
| raising its price. You reduce your costs by firing people or
| renegotiating the prices with suppliers.
|
| "Increasing efficiency" is mostly a theater meant to
| demonstrate effort during low/no growth periods and without
| viable products in development to validate such dynamic.
| mdekkers wrote:
| > "Increasing efficiency" is mostly a theater meant to
| demonstrate effort during low/no growth periods and without
| viable products in development to validate such dynamic.
|
| That really depends on the business. I worked with a
| manufacturing client a few years back, and millisecond
| process improvements could translate into millions of dollars
| increased annual profits. They manufactured parts that would
| sell for about $0.75 a piece at razor thin margins.
| esafak wrote:
| I think the OP meant worker productivity, not efficiency of
| production.
| reactordev wrote:
| While I don't disagree, I think labeling and calling people "bad"
| is wrong. Derek is doing the best he can. He hired you to help
| make the company better, more profitable, etc etc. He's trying
| anything to get _you_ to understand that you need to deliver
| value, a product, a service, research output, something so the
| Bob's have something to sell /offer/justify grant money. I've met
| a lot of engineers that think they were hired to perfect the art
| of software engineering. Not the case, not unless that _is_ your
| mantra and you work at FAANG or Big Blue.
|
| The rest of the 90% have to deliver value. For managers, that's
| getting the product/service/research out the door. For directors,
| it's that X N where N is the number of managers, for VP's the
| same - Product/Service/Output X Directors X Managers.
|
| Often the more inception you have (higher up you go) the more
| confusing the management and meetings as everything becomes
| _strategic_.
|
| I usually work a bit with the team to prove myself, talk the talk
| and walk the walk, before I ever ask to lead them. Let me solve a
| hard problem with you so we both know how we problem solve and
| I'll handle "The Business". I've taken my fair share of punches.
|
| What doesn't help is the black and white thinking that this
| article is written in. If 98 of 100 dashboards aren't used or
| even viewed. Build a grafana dashboard of stuff that is useful
| and present it as a means for cost cutting Power BI. Build a
| bunch of widgets they can use if they need it. I'm saying - take
| a step back and look not at the individuals behavior but at the
| situation that drives it. How can you, the engineer, provide
| better tooling so Derek looks like a genius. They clearly know
| what you're working on, how production is going. Bob has stuff to
| sell and people to drink with. You get more time to work on
| perfecting the art of software engineering.
|
| Stop looking at ineptitude as someone's failure and start looking
| at it as an opportunity to provide solutions to help those who
| can't Rust, rust. Or those who are stuck on C++. Or Brian who
| keeps committing small revisions to PRs and makes 30-80 commit
| PRs in a sprint. These are not signs of individual failure, they
| are symptoms.
| uoaei wrote:
| So what do we call it when "the best they can" is not very good
| or is actively harmful? Do you mean to imply that intention
| factors into outcomes?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Derek is doing the best he can.
|
| He's doing what is best to keep his job. Not what leads to his
| best work.
| specialist wrote:
| > _Derek is doing the best he can._
|
| Yup. Few people go to work every day to do a bad job.
|
| Like the OC's epiphany about Sturgeon's Law, I chilled (a
| little bit) once I realized that most people are already
| playing at their highest level.
|
| > _...start looking at it as an opportunity to provide
| solutions to help..._
|
| Back when I was doing proper product development, eg burning
| CDs and printing manuals, this was a pretty good strategy.
|
| Something changed. And I'm not smart enough to see it.
|
| My best guess is that most dev work is now "IT". Agile.
| Everything is make believe. Nothing ever really ships or is
| considered done. Then 18 - 36 elapse and its time for a do
| over. Any knowledge, culture, or lessons learned sent to
| /dev/null.
|
| I've been binging the Oxide Computer podcast. They're actually
| making something. Concrete, real, shippable, useful. That'd be
| nice.
| ozim wrote:
| To add to that by Strugeon law organizations cannot hire
| "best of the best".
|
| Organization has option to hire crud and have stuff done
| where other option is not having done anything at all.
|
| Other option of course is to work best employees to the
| ground.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| This was honestly cathartic and a completely refreshing read.
| Lots of articles rightly criticise the vast and widespread
| incompetence management and organisations. But this article comes
| at it from a different angle and I really enjoyed the read.
|
| The "Dereks" of the article are some of the worst members of this
| corporate incompetence.
|
| Derek was the main reason I left my last job. Systematically
| failed to manage the entire development department (about 30
| teams) and actively hostile to any and all suggestions that
| weren't his, even going as far as falsely reporting people to HR
| if they rightly criticised another dumb decision. Frequently
| stole the ideas and suggestions people made and claiming them as
| his own, despite having reported said person to their manager or
| HR for the very same idea months prior. Absolutely classic "yes
| man" with a smug and nasty personality.
|
| All of the good devs left, with nothing to show for it. Three
| years and customers hated the crappy software, that was only
| pushed for because some CEO type had heard about "digital
| transformation" and "cloud" - and of course lots of agile
| bullshit thrown in on top.
| angarg12 wrote:
| On one side we have things like the efficient market hypothesis,
| that says that people are rational, they make logical decisions,
| and there is no room for inefficiencies.
|
| On the other we might think that people who runs companies are
| blithering idiots who just got lucky, and their head is so far up
| their asses that they can't see they are headed to self-
| destruction.
|
| Reality is somewhere in between.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| I think this is a manifestation of Prisoner's Dilemma.
|
| If everybody in the organization would co-operate and do their
| best everybody would win. But if some people or some managers
| decide to look for their own interests and job-security first,
| the people who do the right thing will lose.
|
| We are all just prisoners here, of our own device
| MetalGuru wrote:
| I still don't understand why things need to be this way? Like,
| people could not be worthless. It's theoretically possible.
| lmm wrote:
| I think it's getting better, but slowly, like all social
| change. You read books about corporate culture from 50 years
| ago and it's all jock stuff and personal loyalty. Now there's
| at least some sense of the job being actually doing the job
| right, even if at the moment that mostly cashes out as saying
| the right buzzwords.
| stinkytaco wrote:
| I'd like to see a post like this on HN where someone revisits
| their organization 10 years later and decides if they were right
| or not.
|
| It's not that all organizations don't have disfunction, but as a
| younger person I was very fixated on everything I saw that was
| _wrong_ and ignored either the problems I myself was introducing
| which were (and probably still are) numerous or the systems and
| programs that made the organization successful. Now that I 'm
| older and in a position with a different perspective, I'm far
| less likely to find systemic fault. Perhaps I'm just lucky in my
| career atc? I don't have a blog to go back to, but this author
| seems insightful and I'd like to see what they think in 5 or 10
| years.
| _shadi wrote:
| > It's not that all organizations don't have disfunction, but
| as a younger person I was very fixated on everything I saw that
| was wrong and ignored either the problems I myself was
| introducing which were (and probably still are) numerous or the
| systems and programs that made the organization successful.
|
| speaking from my own experience, when I look at my earlier
| career years I didn't appreciate how resilient organizations
| can be to disfunction, yes 100 things are broken, but for the
| most part everything will still be fine.
| campbel wrote:
| Not to mention how incredibly challenging it is to build an
| organization that is highly functioning. I've had the
| pleasure of working at a few different companies and I feel
| the most internally mature were the companies that had been
| around the longest. Sure, they had issues, but fundamentally
| they had insulated themselves from a large class of problems
| that the startups were constantly fighting through.
| pixelfarmer wrote:
| There is systemic fault. It starts with hierarchical
| structuring. It doesn't mean that hierarchies are inherently
| bad, but there are consequences from that and the additional
| things that people usually imply that come with it. This can
| seriously hamper productivity, for example, even in the small
| scale. Once you start to think that through you will also see
| how far reaching the agile manifesto truly is and that the
| content in there is nothing short of "nuclear" for typical
| corpo structuring and processes that are developed around it.
| depr wrote:
| If you have no explicit hierarchy then an implicit hierarchy
| will start to form in most cases, which can be even worse. In
| many cases you have both.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > in most cases
|
| I'd say "in evey case". And I'd say this happens whether or
| not there's an explicit hierarchy. Being articulate, or
| having knowledge or contacts, will get you more attention.
| The only way to mitigate this is through explicit
| processes, which have to be regularly reviewed. Meetings
| have to be chaired strictly. Everybody has to sign-up to
| the agreed processes.
|
| These processes are time-consuming, and decisions can be
| slow. It becomes worse the bigger the organisation. I don't
| know how non-hierarchical decision-making can work in an
| enterprise where there are significant assets at stake;
| I've only ever seen it work in voluntary political
| associations in which non-hierarchical organisation is one
| of the prime objectives.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Those things become inevitable when a 3rd layer of
| management appears (for a total of 4 layers).
|
| I'm not sure how far you can push a 3-layered organization,
| but it's absolutely something that exists on some scale,
| without a phantom organization appearing.
| achenet wrote:
| yep.
|
| https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
| coxmichael wrote:
| I'm not convinced this is inevitable, but it certainly
| feels it within the current system. Co-ops exist and can be
| very successful.
|
| Hierarchies can be time-limited, or democratically limited,
| it just depends on the legal and organisational framework.
| pixelfarmer wrote:
| Question is then, why do you have both? Where does this
| implicit "hierarchy" come from? It is simple: As soon as
| you have multiple people working on a problem there are
| communication requirements. You can organize things in a
| way that they support these requirements or you can just
| let them figure out how to adapt their needs around some
| existing hierarchy. Now which one do you think is more
| efficient?
|
| Hierarchies are just an organizational pattern, a tool.
| There are neither a religion or "set in stone" as many
| think, they create communication choke points, induce
| unnecessary communication, cause "not our responsibility"
| mentality that may result in things falling through the
| cracks, have often the "Chinese whispers" problem to it,
| and so on. You cannot treat every problem like a nail just
| because your only tool is a hammer.
| Rayhem wrote:
| > You can organize things in a way that they support
| these requirements or you can just let them figure out
| how to adapt their needs around some existing hierarchy.
| Now which one do you think is more efficient?
|
| I think this is a pretty great statement of the converse
| of Conway's Law[1].
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
| itronitron wrote:
| What happens to be wrong is all relative to everything else
| wrong in the larger organization.
|
| It's been my experience that a lot of an organization's
| internal messaging is crafted to be a distraction from either
| really bad stuff that is going on or simply because management
| can't or doesn't want to do productive work.
|
| From that perspective, any dysfunction in a small team is
| inconsequential to the organization.
|
| As a younger person that was the sort of stuff I fixated on,
| until I learned that the various _very trusted professional
| corporate suit folks acting like HQ_ were doing illegal shit,
| destroying their families with workplace affairs, bullying
| everyone around them, and ruining other people 's work.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| What happens when you were right?
|
| Eg, as an SDE in 2017 you worked on Amazon Device's
| econometrics team and were screaming the entire org was in
| trouble -- but the PhD economists and directors ignored you.
|
| We're at 5 years, a gutted department, billions in losses, etc.
| Now what?
|
| Or you warned WarnerMedia executives about their internal
| corporate misandry just before they fired Johnny Depp for being
| a male victim -- and destroyed two tent pole properties in the
| process.
|
| Or were at Amazon again and warned there'd be financial
| troubles circa start of 2022 based on unprofessional conduct in
| FinTech?
|
| ...what happens when you're repeatedly right about multi-
| billion dollar mistakes _before_ they happen, but your employer
| just doesn't care?
|
| I don't want to participate in what I see at WarnerMedia,
| Amazon,... Target, Disney, Bud Light, etc.
|
| I want to be able to say I did the right thing for shareholders
| -- not shut my mouth and took the hush money to defraud them.
| HL33tibCe7 wrote:
| > ...what happens when you're repeatedly right about multi-
| billion dollar mistakes before they happen, but your employer
| just doesn't care? > > I don't want to participate in what I
| see at WarnerMedia, Amazon,... Target, Disney, Bud Light,
| etc. > > I want to be able to say I did the right thing for
| shareholders -- not shut my mouth and took the hush money to
| defraud them.
|
| If you truly think this, the only moral course of action for
| you is to immediately leave the company. Otherwise you're
| "fraudelently" continuing to take shareholder money. If you
| think the execs of your company give a shit, or will ever
| give a shit, about what employee #3141991403 thinks about the
| direction of your company, you're delusional.
|
| If you want my opinion, just shut up and take the money. It's
| not your problem if shareholders make bad decisions. And
| besides, if it wasn't you, it'd be someone else.
| isthispermanent wrote:
| Hadn't considered Pirates of the Caribbean as a loss in the
| Depp-Heard fight until just now, kinda sad.
|
| Also like your use of tent-pole.
| achenet wrote:
| maybe I've read too many Taleb books, but can you put
| yourself in a position to bet against the stupidity? For
| example, take a short position on WarnerMedia/Amazon stock?
| itronitron wrote:
| It would probably be safer to buy options instead of short-
| selling a stock, because with options your potential loss
| is limited and known.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| You didn't reference Fat Tony or use a made-up word, you're
| still ok!
| joaonmatos wrote:
| I think you're right in the aggregate and the abstract.
|
| But it's also funny that two of the situations you mentioned
| (Johnny Depp "victim" and Bud Light) are fake stories based
| on conservative media astroturfing where any judge would be
| hard pressed to find that there was unreasonable behaviour on
| the corporate end.
|
| And of course, being a white knight only works if you're
| privileged enough to be able to jump ship or fight your
| social wars and still have something to fall back on. Not
| everyone here is a US citizen with US resident parents and US
| college education, earns 6 figures, or has had decades of
| working experience to accumulate savings and make a CV.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| WarnerMedia fired Johnny Depp based on unsubstantiated
| allegations from a woman who herself has a history of
| domestic violence and Mr Depp was subsequently found to
| have been defamed and awarded damages for that lost work.
|
| WarnerMedia fired Mr Depp for mere allegations, but
| retained Ms Heard despite police reports documenting her
| abusing her girlfriend at an airport.
|
| The sexism shown by WarnerMedia executives is not in the
| interests of shareholders -- and is part of not only why
| WarnerMedia had to be sold off from ATT for a massive loss,
| but has failed to recover post merger with Discovery.
|
| - - - - -
|
| Similarly, Bud Light decided to endorse a controversial
| spokesman, call their core audience bigots when they
| objected, denigrated them as "fratty" and "out of touch"...
| then seemed confused when the people they were openly rude
| to stopped buying their product.
|
| - - - - -
|
| What particular facts do you believe I'm wrong about?
|
| I'm curious -- and explaining that is much more interesting
| than _Poisoning the Well_ fallacies, such as calling things
| you disagree with "astroturf".
|
| - - - - -
|
| Finally, that's excuses: you made up a stereotype about who
| I am, then decided you can safely ignore my point because
| that stereotype doesn't apply to you.
| Gormisdomai wrote:
| There must now be projects like the one the author describes
| that are at least 5-10 years old now, I'd love to see a
| comparison of ones that delivered their promises and ones that
| keep delusionally lumbering on.
| antupis wrote:
| I have gone oppositional direction younger me was kinda yes-man
| and now I am more jaded and see systemic failures all around
| me.
| artyom wrote:
| I was expecting an thoughtful analysis, got a furious rant
| instead.
|
| Not disappointed at all.
| justin_oaks wrote:
| Of course the organization doesn't want to improve things. The
| bosses would have to be humble enough to receive feedback. Most
| people can't take feedback, let alone the bosses who feel that
| those under their management are beneath them.
|
| At my last job, the bosses ignored everything even the smartest
| employees suggested. Changes only came when customers, news
| outlets, vendors, or auditors made suggestions. Anyone external
| had more influence on company direction than the most experienced
| employees. A person leaving an anonymous review on an app store
| had more influence.
|
| It was clear that we were ignored because the bosses didn't want
| to take direction from those they manage. Their arrogance and
| fragile egos wouldn't allow them to.
| steve_gh wrote:
| > Anyone external had more influence on company direction than
| the most experienced employees.
|
| That's one reason why people employ consultants. A consultant
| is someone an organisation employs to tell it what it already
| knows. Sometimes it doesn't know that it knows it, but more
| often it already knows what needs to be done, but an external
| entity gives a veneer of respectability to grasping a difficult
| nettle.
| birdstheword5 wrote:
| > Sturgeon's Law, 90% of everything is crud, and that explains
| almost everything
|
| > In professional settings, approximately all of my time goes
| into solving problems introduced by people that are just
| indescribably bad
|
| Translation: everyone except me is stupid.
|
| Why do we let people say things like this without calling them
| out on it?
| lulznews wrote:
| >I have never met a single manager at any large company that has
| not said they want to be data driven.
|
| This is a powerful insight. Very important article.
| [deleted]
| jiggawatts wrote:
| > "This is because Power BI tracks usage metrics and almost all
| dashboards are completely unused."
|
| Ha-ha... _haaa_
|
| Yes, I know that feeling all to well: I set up some fancy DevOps
| thing and then see that the all-time logins are a big fat zero
| for 70% of the people that should checking the system daily.
|
| This is reality: the DevOps team lead, the entire sysops team,
| and all but one developer literally never even looking at any of:
| APM, deployment pipeline, log analytics system, issue tracker, or
| dashboard.
| spydum wrote:
| i think tech folks like us often fail on this front of "change
| management". We can build/buy/integrate amazing tools that can
| actually solve (or prevent) problems, but we suck at changing
| organization behavior to adopt them and extract the value. Then
| we all look around like: why are we still operating in hard
| mode? because we havent made the case for change, and convinced
| folks to implement it. changing human behavior is tough
| chris_wot wrote:
| I work at a school, and hop boy do the students damage their
| laptops a lot. When we hit the point where we refused to loan
| out laptops for stupid shit like the kid punched the laptop
| screen, we found that the year coordinators actually needed a
| very simple daily report with the name of the student and how
| long the laptop has been in for repair.
|
| That's it. And you know what? It was _useful_.
|
| You can make as many fancy dashboards as you like. But if the
| data is truly useful operationally, it will likely be a boring
| list with no graphics.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| IDK, but a possible counterargument to some of your observation
| is that you could have a team where every day/week they have a
| meeting to look at the dashboards, and it's always Sam who
| opens the dashboard and shares on the big monitor/group call.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Replace Sam with me, the person that built the thing.
|
| My experience aligns with the the author of the original blog
| article.
|
| It's impossible for someone near the bottom of a hierarchy to
| convince anyone of anything, _unless_ the building is
| literally on fire and you 're the external fire safety
| consultant.
|
| I'm the proverbial fire safety consultant. I come in, upgrade
| the suppression systems, hold multiple hour-long training
| sessions on how to check the figurative "water levels"... and
| nobody does. If I turn up a year later, it's guaranteed that
| the system is empty and rusting, and the monitoring panels
| have cobwebs on them.
|
| I've actually noticed that you can have an emergency
| situation (a "raging fire"), and then sure, people will
| listen to you about _that_ particular problem, but if you ask
| them to pour a glass of water onto something that is "just
| smouldering" they'll laugh in your face for wasting their
| time. "Come back later if it's really on fire."
| zoomablemind wrote:
| It's obviously a rant-inspired introspection about a specific
| kind of organisations.
|
| These orgs are not truly functioning per market principles, yet
| for various reasons are stuck in a captive energy state that no
| one dares to disturb.
|
| It could be a niche product sold out to big orgs or other steady
| clients. It could be a subsidiary or some other steady org.
| Either way, there is no market pressure to really push such orgs
| to adapt.
|
| Thus all this theater and moldy props. These orgs are not
| expected to improve, they will live, but required to demonstrate
| an effort.
|
| This reminds me of some shitty restaurants or deserted "boutique"
| storefronts which stay in business for decades with no suply-
| demand explanation for such longevity. I guess, these may somehow
| have low operating costs and some strong funding source.
| lazide wrote:
| They're still functioning per market principles, just like the
| Dodo bird was still functioning in an evolutionary environment!
|
| It was just a particularly protected and 'calm' place. Which,
| unfortunately, made the Dodo bird very susceptible to an
| outside context problem/sudden upset. But it worked for a very
| long time!
| ajkjk wrote:
| > These orgs are not truly functioning per market principles,
| yet for various reasons are stuck in a captive energy state
| that no one dares to disturb.
|
| All signs point to market principles leading directly to this
| kind of situation. It _seems_ like markets produce ruthless
| competition but that 's a rudimentary and naive extrapolation
| from the prediction.
|
| Reality gives good evidence to a more sophisticated prediction:
| that, in times of non-scarcity, markets produce docile
| mediocrity, because everyone's goal is to keep their job and
| make enough money and status to survive, rather than to
| maximize their money or status, and mediocrity attains that.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Absolutely this.
|
| People keep thinking about markets as some all-knowing
| relentless optimization machines. But they are just a bunch
| of distributed computing acting on extremely limited data
| trying to act over a completely chaotic environment.
|
| Markets are neither all-knowing nor relentless. They are
| always extremely conservative and risk-adverse. That holds
| for times of crisis too, they just become a little bit less
| risk-adverse.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| Oh I love it when people say "we're an agile shop". Meaningless.
| No you're not, I know this because you signed a contract that
| says that in two years you're going to deliver a specific pre-
| agreed set of features. But I guess if you say you're "agile"
| you'll get brownie points with the next level up? Who knows.
| Doesn't matter, I suppose.
| seer wrote:
| The author seems to be doing the classic mistake of thinking how
| to use technical means to solve what amounts to political
| problems.
|
| All the Dereks I've met over the years (I know terribly
| anecdotal) are aware of the position they're in. They are
| desperately scared of those nosy engineers that can _prove with
| data_ how bad they are and try hard to put them in positions
| where that is not possible.
|
| The portrayal of Michael Scott in "The Office" was sometimes too
| painfully real.
|
| But knowing that, I've found its actually possible to use it to
| your own if not advantage, then at least peace of mind.
|
| The way one does it is to get to know your Derek as a person,
| become his confidant - a surprisingly large amount of the "stupid
| jira tickets" those people generate are usually because of of
| very stupid requirements and policies that _they have to follow_.
|
| After one understands the deep reasons for the busy work and
| inefficiencies - be it other bosses and hire ups or inadequate
| policies, one can work with their Dereks to sideline / fix them.
| The former being way easier than the latter of course.
|
| Then you can approach the hire ups and understand why _they_ put
| those policies in the first place, slowly getting a deeper
| understanding of the bigger picture. Cause there usually are
| reasons for all the madness, it just takes civility, patience and
| empathy to get to it.
|
| "Why bother" one would ask? Well in the end you get known by all
| those people as "the guy to go to, to get shit done" and start
| being pushed into very interesting and consequential projects.
| People trust you, at least on a personal level - and even if you
| don't manage to solve the political issues that frustrate you,
| you still have the peace of mind of being productive and friendly
| with your environment.
| [deleted]
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| Which companies do things "right"? How do I select for them when
| interviewing?
|
| Also, how do I know that _I'm_ not the one who's wrong?
| esafak wrote:
| I'd look for companies led by conscientious founders.
| lmm wrote:
| > Which companies do things "right"?
|
| Small ones, or ones that are very focused on making money.
|
| > How do I select for them when interviewing?
|
| Ask the people who interview you what they work on and why,
| then avoid the ones where the "why" doesn't connect back to
| something useful.
|
| > Also, how do I know that _I'm_ not the one who's wrong?
|
| You don't, not immediately. In the end you can only look at the
| results over the medium/long term.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| > Most managers have never had an independent thought on how to
| manage people effectively (hence the Agile parroting)
|
| exactly. And if you want to decide whether you want to work at a
| company, you can look at the top managers and imagine if _they_
| ever have independent thoughts.
| sharas- wrote:
| this examines corporate characters:
| https://bitslap.it/blog/posts/playground-it.html
| lr4444lr wrote:
| The upside to all of this is that large monopolistic corporations
| in an industry can be utterly vanquished by much smaller
| competitors who focus on hiring productive, capable people who
| work really well with one another. And it doesn't take a lot of
| them, because the org. described in this post is often getting in
| its own way, and is unable to deliver a sustained defense on
| quality or efficiency. So they often try to sue - but that's
| often blood in the water, and equally a sign to keep striking
| that weak spot as it is a serious deterrence.
| darrenbkl wrote:
| I remember in one episode of Silicon Valley, Gavin was
| lecturing Richard on a similar topic along the line of "so you
| don't want your startup to be an big corporation, and what's
| next for you? Taking vc money? going Ipo? And then becoming a
| big corp?"
| jmcgough wrote:
| > It was sparked by reference to a concept called the honne-
| tatemae divide, which are Japanese concepts related to the true
| feelings of an individual and the front they present in public
|
| Another related concept is in sociology, back stage vs front
| stage self:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramaturgy_(sociology)
| smokefoot wrote:
| This is a painfully cynical take and beyond that I'm not sure
| what he's trying to say. If it's all crap, make it better. Do
| something, don't just complain!
| politelemon wrote:
| That doesn't make sense. People who aren't in a position to
| change things shouldn't have to hold their opinions back. I
| have opinions about how my country is run, what trending with
| people, and reddit's latest decision making. I have limited to
| no control over each. It does not mean I need to be quiet
| though, that's how _nothing_ happens.
| ornornor wrote:
| I believe as you get older and value your own sanity more
| (maybe because you have less energy to expand overall?)
| that's exactly what you do: nothing.
|
| I hate what Reddit has become. The day they killed third
| party apps etc, I just deleted my account with "hi spez" as
| the reason. Reddit is still running to it's ruin and I've
| achieved nothing on that front but my sanity is preserved and
| I got 30-60 minutes a day of my life back.
| jahewson wrote:
| I once worked with a guy who had standards and a good handle on
| the disappointing gap between concept and reality and even he
| said to me "that's your problem John, you're always trying to
| change things".
|
| A few months later he quit.
| pdimitar wrote:
| How? Programmers don't have executive powers. You are very
| often told that this is not your job and you should be doing
| yours and leave the "experts" to theirs.
|
| Well, they are not experts. They are not even at the level of
| informed amateurs. But they have the power.
|
| What would you do?
|
| Sure, there are good companies and you can switch until you
| find one but let's recognize that statistically speaking this
| absolutely does not scale -- likely maximum 20% of the
| programmer workforce can do that. Maybe even only 10%.
|
| So again, what would you do?
| patmcc wrote:
| >>>How? Programmers don't have executive powers.
|
| The secret is - and this is wielded a million times a day in
| a million small ways - of course we do. Lots of people do in
| lots of jobs, whether intended or not.
|
| You just _do the thing_. You don 't ask about doing the
| thing, you don't put in a project planning proposal, you
| don't beg your manager to devote 20% of your time to the
| thing, you just go and do it because you probably can. And as
| long as you do it, and it goes well, and nobody really
| notices until it's working, then it turns out you did have
| executive powers the whole time.
|
| Just do the thing. Ask forgiveness, not permission.
| ornornor wrote:
| When do you do it? In between the constant firefighting or
| in between poorly planned "we need this yesterday" tickets?
| lmm wrote:
| The best case, if you're lucky, no-one notices. More likely
| you're marked as a troublemaker and pushed out. You're
| literally better off slacking off for that 20%.
| princeb wrote:
| the best case is that you make the firm a lot of money,
| and you were successful justifying your contribution and
| your deserved commiseration.
|
| the least bad case is that you realize why nobody wanted
| to go ahead with your proposal in the first place but you
| caused no harm other than wasting several months of your
| own effort.
|
| the worst case obviously is that you caused a huge amount
| of problems for the firm and people are aware of where
| those problems came from.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Yeah, that's the only thing that ever worked. I still don't
| recommend it because people do notice, it's just that many
| don't care. But when they do, you're in trouble.
|
| But yeah, I've done it.
| smokefoot wrote:
| In no particular order: 1. Use your powers of persuasion to
| drive better decisions 2. Recruit some good people 3. Suggest
| and execute some positive changes--"there's this thing called
| source control and it's great..." or, "seems like the reports
| we built aren't that useful--how can we make this better"
|
| There's a trap here which is thinking it's all crap so I may
| as well not try. It's seductive but quite poinsonous to the
| organization and to the individual.
| pdimitar wrote:
| > _1. Use your powers of persuasion to drive better
| decisions_
|
| "Appreciate the feedback but we got this covered. Please
| resume your duties."
|
| > _2. Recruit some good people_
|
| Did you miss the part where I said that my comment is from
| the point of view of a working programmer and not an
| executive?
|
| > _3. Suggest and execute some positive changes_
|
| See my reply to your (1) above.
|
| > _"there's this thing called source control and it's
| great..."_
|
| "Don't be a condescending smart-ass please, you are not
| being a team player right now."
|
| > _"seems like the reports we built aren't that useful--how
| can we make this better"_
|
| "They work well enough for us and we have no time budget
| for any modifications, and we are not convinced the said
| modifications are necessary at all".
|
| ---
|
| Your move.
| jsocuwl wrote:
| In a big enough organization, it is a complex system with
| unpredictable outcome. Pouring your soul into it may lead
| to unexpected consequences as opposed to simpler
| environments where your contribution actually make a
| relative difference.
| pdimitar wrote:
| True, that's why if I get to work for a big organization
| again I'll not even entertain the idea of trying to make
| a difference in improving processes. I'll just gulp the
| salary and never stick my nose out of my direct
| responsibilities as written in the contract.
|
| Making a difference can only happen in small tight-knit
| teams.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| I'd leave, and prioritize a functional organization in my
| next job requirements.
| pdimitar wrote:
| I did that. A number of times, because it turns out people
| lie through their teeth that their organization is
| functional (during interviews).
|
| At one point people started asking why I have 3 contracts
| in a single year.
|
| Checkmate.
|
| What would you do?
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Either develop a better intuition for when people are
| lying and how ti read between the lines, or use friends,
| family, and associates you can trust who can do so.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Make my own organization.
| pdimitar wrote:
| I have one, since 2008. Did not automatically make me
| financially independent so as not to care what my
| customers do, sadly.
| ludicity wrote:
| Hello! I am the author, and you've saved me writing this out.
| The whole point is that you actually can't do something (and
| that's okay! I don't complain anymore either!). Burnout comes
| from believing what people are saying in corporate contexts
| without looking at what they're actually doing.
|
| I have come across so many government teams that say they
| want to start using version control... as if someone has been
| stopping them all these years! If they were serious, they'd
| just do it, so you're better off just looking at what they're
| doing than talking.
| Loggias wrote:
| [dead]
| opportune wrote:
| The most jarring thing about entering the workforce to me, and it
| seems to the author as well, is the nigh-pathological lack of
| pride (or "passion", which I think is a loathsome term) most
| people put into their jobs.
|
| I don't accept that all of those people intrinsically are lazy
| morons - maybe some or even most are, but a lot of people get
| that attitude metaphorically beaten into them by lazy and
| disengaged coworkers. I know this for a fact because I've
| witnessed it happen to many people as they mature as workers and
| also noticed it in myself. I can't prove it's not related to age,
| or position in life (eg a young single person eager to prove
| themselves at work, vs someone who prioritizes family) but I know
| firsthand that there are at least some experienced workers with
| families, responsibilities, and hobbies that manage to stay
| focused and engaged for a long time.
|
| I expect some pushback against this, but I really do think this
| phenomenon - whatever you want to call it - is the basis for
| ageism. It frankly is a real, observable thing that life has a
| way of beating the passion out of people into a point they see
| their job as clock-in, clock-out. It doesn't happen to everyone
| of course. One of the reasons I love working with interns and
| recent college grads is that, despite their lack of skills or
| knowledge in many areas, they mostly haven't gone through that
| transformation yet.
| HL33tibCe7 wrote:
| I think this is mostly just growing up and realising that your
| own life is worth more than being a cog in a machine at some
| corporation. Not only that, but in most cases, giving 100%
| every single day actually doesn't matter that much for career
| progression, at least not within most companies. You can coast
| by quite smoothly.
|
| There are certain very high-paying companies where the above
| doesn't apply. But they have to pay high salaries to retain
| staff who _do_ give 100% every day.
| 015a wrote:
| I think its interesting how takes like this are always stated
| so matter-of-factly. Growing up, inevitable maturation, leads
| to the discovery of individualism and the desire for
| something more than being a cog in a machine.
|
| I believe, _strongly_ , that this reverses the cause and
| effect. No one wants to be a cog in a dysfunctional machine;
| and the sheer density of dysfunctional machines in our
| society has induced a renaissance of individualism. Its a
| reasonable response; you can't trust the machine to reliably
| arrive at the correct outcomes, but you can trust yourself.
|
| The biggest reason why I believe so strongly that this cause
| and effect is reversed correlates toward human nature, which
| has always angled toward social organization. Some
| philosophers would argue that there's nothing more fulfilling
| than being a part of an organization larger than the
| individual; taking any form from marriage and starting a
| family, to organized religion, government service, or
| capitalistic corporations.
|
| Individualism isn't a symptom of maturity; its a symptom of
| systemic dysfunction.
| ajkjk wrote:
| I think it's basically circular. If you try to have pride in
| your job, your pride gets destroyed by the frustration of it
| all and you either quit or give up on the pride. So what
| deserves is pride-less work, which causes the frustration.
|
| The best teams I've worked on were ones where we managed to
| _locally_ have pride by feeling like a little team who cared
| about each other 's work and occasional sacrifice (being on-
| call, etc) and it felt like a little family. As soon as
| further-away managers start reaching in and "fiddling" with it,
| from their prideless vantage post where everything is just a
| system to accomplish quarterly goals, the family-feeling fades
| away and it goes back to soul-crushing pointlessness.
| imkehno wrote:
| Yeah, this is what I've also experienced. You can have a
| great team, and a lot of influence in that team context.
| Scaling up that common feeling from 5-10 people gets harder.
| Realizing this, I'm not really interested in working in
| larger organizations anymore. All the overhead that bogs down
| speed just sucks the life out of me.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I have a new heuristic on this sort of stuff. Assume the rule of
| 80/20 is accurate. 80% of profits come from 20% of customers, 80
| % of usefulwork comes from 20% of employees etc.
|
| but then of the remaining 20%, 80% of that (16%) will come from
| 20% of the 80% of other workers.
|
| So just two rounds of this and basically 1/3 of your company
| produces 96% of the results.
|
| this 1/3-2/3 split weirdly seems to correlate with other sources
| (see Google as it grew compared to established firms of same
| revenue)
| ksec wrote:
| >Sturgeon's Law, 90% of everything is crud, and that explains
| almost everything.
|
| I used to think it was an 80/20 split, and later in my life it
| goes up to 90%. Now I think it is more like 95%. Where it fits
| the normal distribution curve.
|
| It is sad, but I am also surprised and inspired how 5% of people
| are pushing the progress so 95% of people gets to benefits, most
| likely without them knowing it.
|
| The author said 10 years ago. HN used to discuss a lot of these
| things pre 2015, and it was mostly gone from 2015 - 2022 because
| it doesn't fit the general Silicon Valley narrative. But I am
| glad it is back.
| wcerfgba wrote:
| I would like to know what initiatives at systemic change the
| author has participated in, and what the outcomes where. There
| are plenty of case studies of action research and appreciative
| inquiry leading to more effective and fulfilling organisations.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| The problem with software engineering in large companies is that
| the large companies are encoding themselves in software - it's
| the natural endpoint of software eating the world.
|
| The problem is that software engineers are then asked to square
| all the circles - the hacks, the business models that don't work,
| the illogical policies that have kept the peace between powerful
| entrenched parties.
|
| Volkswagen found it impossible to build a diesel engine that met
| California emissions criteria. So they encoded a cheat.
|
| They did not write the cheat in an email, the CTO literally
| committed a line of code. (wish I could see the repo).
|
| The point is that software demands clarity - it has no vagueness.
| So if you are going to digitise your business your business
| processes and model must also be clean and clear.
| jerska wrote:
| Smart people don't consider themselves better than people around
| them.
|
| This article is so annoying.
|
| It has some truth to it, e.g. the mismatch between incentives and
| success, or even the corporate bullshit to avoid saying hard
| truths are on point. But the second part lacks the proper
| reasoning needed to establish the self-proclaimed intelligence of
| it author. Comparing software development's product building with
| fencing competitions is so far-fetched, yet most of the arguments
| of the second part build on this premise. You don't need amazing
| individuals to build a great thing, what you need is a great
| team. That's why most people try to address the system. It's hard
| to do when you factor in individual incentives, but it's not
| because everybody is dumb, it's because everybody (smartly)
| addresses their own self-interests above the company's.
| jdeaton wrote:
| > Smart people don't consider themselves better than people
| around them.
|
| Do you have any direct evidence of this or are you merely
| making an observation.
| brilee wrote:
| In this long rant, there is only one concrete thing named that is
| supposedly bad:
|
| > I saw someone that was working on a few Git branches, twenty
| years my senior, and they decided to clone the entire repository
| ten times, then checkout a different branch in each repository
| clone "because it's easier". > Can you imagine the kind of havoc
| such a person could wreak upon infrastructure and code if left
| unchecked?
|
| But I'm very confused, because this is the workflow paradigm of
| several VCSs that are not named Git. If this is their only
| concrete complaint, then I have to assume that this person has no
| idea what they're talking about.
| coolmitch wrote:
| i see a lot of people doing this, and especially if theyre
| shallow clones, its really not a big deal
|
| and anyway git-worktree is basically this workflow wrapped in
| nicer UX
| pythonaut_16 wrote:
| Worktrees are super useful to avoid interrupting your work in
| progress when you need to load another branch to help someone
| debug something.
| ornornor wrote:
| Ha. I typically stash and checkout the other branch or
| commit a wip that I'll undo when I'm back and checkout the
| other branch.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| I think that is besides the point. If there is no adequate
| enough training in the work flow or basic tooling concepts for
| employees such that this is what people are doing with git,
| there are probably serious problems afoot with best practices
| and productivity.
| ludicity wrote:
| Hello, hello, I am the original poster. I had surmised why this
| person was doing this, but didn't want to spend ages venting
| about a particular person, especially in a way that might
| actually cause that person to realize they're reading about
| themselves one day. Suffice it to say that there are other
| serious issues.
|
| Here's a more concrete thing - I work on a product that took
| years and a spectacular sum of money to get going on the data
| space (all it does is land CSVs into S3 and then load them into
| a database every day, < 10GB per day). The original designers
| decided that the entire thing should be powered by
| spreadsheets, so we now have about 10 full-time staff editing
| spreadsheets that trigger build pipelines, one of which I
| believe has 400 separate worksheets in it.
|
| However, you are right that, broadly speaking, I have no idea
| what I'm talking about. I have made peace with this.
| zoomablemind wrote:
| Re: Git usage
|
| Your colleague, well, maybe you as well, could instead make
| use of 'git worktree'
|
| https://git-scm.com/docs/git-worktree
|
| It allows exactly that, use a single repo yet have parallel
| checkouts in separate directories.
| juped wrote:
| This is a good example of why you shouldn't listen to the
| Hacker News peanut gallery, because it is about as silly as
| you originally implied it was; a tiny bit of documentation
| reading will let you know you can check out as many worktrees
| into different directories as you like.
|
| I would advise you to instead eliminate _class prejudice_
| from your writing. A common type of class prejudicial remark
| programmers make is sniping at "spreadsheets", i.e., the
| programming tools of the outgroup not initiated into
| nonsensical programmer esoterica, aren't those nonprogrammers
| benighted and silly? But really, spreadsheets are so valuable
| to them because they're one of the only ways they can tell a
| computer (a machine that ostensibly serves them) what to do
| without interacting with the priesthood.
|
| But you shouldn't listen to me either. I'm just some fucking
| moron on a website. Please understand this.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Truth be told, I liked your article a lot but that particular
| example definitely should have been replaced with something
| more concrete and a bit more convincing.
|
| Having several copies of a GIT repo for different branches is
| a viable strategy as long as one does not do force-pushes.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Yeah I do this on a daily basis. Sometimes I want to have
| two different branches open simultaneously. Maybe there's
| some fancy git hackery to have two open workspaces from the
| same .git local repository. But you know what? My time to
| figure that out is worth more than the measly megabytes of
| saved disk space.
| erano wrote:
| The official way to do this is using git worktrees[0],
| but, as you say, it may not be worth the time to learn if
| what you have is working for you.
|
| [0] https://git-scm.com/docs/git-worktree
| pdimitar wrote:
| It's not even only that, when you switch to another
| worktree you catch your language server with its pants
| down, and some tooling e.g. test watchers are bugging out
| as well.
|
| I just always found it cleaner to have several
| directories on the rare occasion I need to work on
| several branches almost in parallel.
|
| And let's face it, most of us don't work in a repo that
| is 100GB or above. Even if it was a 10GB I wouldn't care
| one bit and can easily have 20 copies of it temporarily.
| Cerium wrote:
| Lookup git worktrees. They are very easy to use and save
| you time since no matter how many you make you only need
| to fetch once. As an added bonus, someday you might be
| working on a project with 100gb repo and find that it
| makes a big difference.
| ludicity wrote:
| Thank you for the feedback - I hammered this out over an
| hour this morning, and wasn't really expecting much
| readership but should have been more careful. As noted
| elsewhere on my blog, I'm young enough that I've only used
| Git, so it's good to know that the original example was not
| good. I read much too far into it given the other
| dysfunction I've seen from the same people.
|
| In any case, I've made a speedy replacement.
| pdimitar wrote:
| > _wasn 't really expecting much readership but should
| have been more careful._
|
| Fair enough but if you allow me to suggest you this:
| don't do it for the readership, do it for your own skills
| of eloquent and convincing writing. Even if nobody ever
| reads it, developing proper articulation and being
| exhaustive in your analysis will only make you smarter
| and better at what you do.
|
| This is unsolicited advice though, and I apologize if
| it's misplaced.
| Michelangelo11 wrote:
| > This means they will inevitably become promoted over time,
| because unlike the rest of us who have to put in effort and pay
| what a friend of mine terms soul cost to act like a sycophant,
| they believe it sincerely.
|
| "Soul cost" is only a problem if you have a soul.
| pdimitar wrote:
| That article was a very nice surprise and apart from how
| crushingly accurate it is (before somebody jumps in to defend all
| the corporate chaos, of course) it also had me giggling several
| times while reading it.
|
| The answer of course is financial incentives. It is the answer
| 99% of the time, I know quite a few high-profile managers at this
| point and they are all very smart and get stuff done people and
| yet they allow themselves be dragged into endless meetings and
| they know the script (that the OP author is referring to several
| times) and they recite it by heart. Because if they don't,
| _their_ manager is going to think they are useless and will
| inevitably fire them.
|
| People find a cushy place to work in with a good salary, then
| just work their way up the economical ladder (or the
| organizational) and will do _anything_ that 's needed to achieve
| that goal. It's as simple as that, and I am convinced that a good
| chunk of these people (probably 20%-30%) are very well aware they
| are bullshitters but they think they have no choice.
|
| At the same time, I've known a few company owners long time ago
| who were just BEGGING their managers to tell them the problems
| exactly as they are, swore on their lives they will not fire the
| managers for bringing them bad news (and made contracts that made
| sure of it in no uncertain terms)... and yet all of the managers
| below those people were sycophant yes-men.
|
| Quite tragic really. All of this is a collective delusion.
|
| I keep remembering this old article -- "Bullshit Jobs" -- and
| yep, it still rings true to this day, and will likely do so for
| decades more, likely centuries even because our societal changes
| are slower than glaciers...
| [deleted]
| mdekkers wrote:
| What you are describing is also known as "The Peter Principle"
| which holds that everyone will eventually be promoted to their
| level of incompetence. Smart companies know this and make sure
| it doesn't cripple their business.
| pdimitar wrote:
| If they were so smart they would cut some cruft. Or most of
| it.
| js8 wrote:
| That's why I am a fan of democracy, even in economic sphere
| (aka socialism or cooperatives). Giving everybody the same
| single vote (same power) about the organization (and making it
| into an unchangeable fact) removes lots of these incentives
| that prevent improving the organization. But lot of people are
| blindly accepting capitalism, because.. well it's incidentally
| also explained in the article, why.
| Shaanie wrote:
| It's interesting then how cooperatives aren't more popular or
| more successful. You'd think that if they were significantly
| more efficient than the typical dictatorship companies then
| they'd outcompete them, but as far as I'm aware that doesn't
| happen.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| I think there's often an issue of how you measure success.
| Co-ops seem to have much lower tendency to try and take
| over the world than corporations inevitably seem to display
| at scale - quite content to return comfortable salaries
| year-after-year to their employee-owners, rather than reap
| profits at all costs.
|
| As a concrete example, Mondragon has been operating very
| successfully for ~70 years, but barely anyone from outside
| the region registers its existence.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Right, and if this was the enforced model there would be
| a lot better spread of risk and a lot more competition.
| But it's Socialism!!!!
|
| Instead we are almost down to one or two grocery chains
| and the government is left with the impossible task of
| regulating the consolidation to mitigate risk and screwed
| prices.
| coxmichael wrote:
| It's harder to get finance as a co-operative, so it's
| hardly a fair competition.
|
| Also, in most studies, co-ops and employee ownership models
| do actually end up being more profitable and sustainable in
| the long term [0, 1].
|
| [0] Page 23+ in this UK government review on employee
| ownership: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/governm
| ent/uploads/...
|
| [1] ONS report showing the rate of survival of cooperatives
| in the UK after five years was 80 percent compared with
| only 41 percent for all other enterprises
| https://www.uk.coop/sites/default/files/2020-10/co-
| operative...
| Shaanie wrote:
| Skimmed the first report and it seems like employee-owned
| companies perform better up until around 75 employees,
| after which there's no benefit? That would explain why
| they aren't outcompeting the larger companies - their
| advantage disappears when they grow.
| coxmichael wrote:
| I'd wager that's more to do with raising finance than
| organisational productivity, but I'm not aware of any
| actual research on something of that scale or even how to
| accurately study those effects without it turning into
| more of a qualitative theory.
|
| Still, it's quite an interesting possibility worth
| pursuing in my opinion. (Full disclosure, I work for a
| small nominally employee-owned company, and have mixed
| thoughts about how it works in practice).
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Corporations from the perspective of most employees are
| communists dictatorships.
|
| Think about it: you use a communal means of production,
| distribute profits centrally, and you don't get to vote for
| who gets to be your manager.
| Jensson wrote:
| Communism builds walls to prevent you from leaving and put
| you in labor camps if you refuse to do the work assigned to
| you. So they are not very comparable at all, consent makes
| a huge difference.
| v-erne wrote:
| Playing devils advocate here - how this is inherent to
| communism? I would rather guess that this is emerged
| behaviour of any human system that is facing collapse and
| has no preventions build in.
|
| I could probably find a few not so great capitalistic
| systems results (even American flavoured ones) that had
| tendencies dangerously close to those you describe (ever
| heard about company stores ?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store).
| harimau777 wrote:
| Leaving is often quite difficult because it means losing
| benefits and there are often not better alternatives.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Walls like health insurance and references?
| uoaei wrote:
| I guess misconceptions like these are why theorists
| abandoned the term 'communism' in favor of 'communalism' to
| explain what they meant.
|
| This isn't even a no-true-scotsman argument, but if all
| that comes to mind when communism comes up is Soviet
| dictatorship, the cold war propaganda worked.
| tilne wrote:
| What should come to mind when communism comes up then?
| coxmichael wrote:
| Something along the lines of: A socioeconomic order
| centered around common ownership of the means of
| production, distribution, and exchange that allocates
| products to everyone in the society based on need.
|
| I guess the point of the poster above is that the word
| communism just confuses things in the initial statement
| -- it's just a dictatorship. Socialists and communists
| fairly uniquely believe in workplace democracy.
| harimau777 wrote:
| A rule of thumb that makes sense to me is that communism
| generally differs from socialism in that it advocates one
| or more of the following:
|
| - People actually living and working in communes.
|
| - Abolition of private property (note: this is not the
| same as personal property).
|
| - Extreme redistribution and/or equality in
| wealth/income.
|
| I'm sure that this isn't a perfect heuristic; however, I
| think it's often useful for detecting when someone is
| trying to describe something as communism in order to
| make it look bad.
| harimau777 wrote:
| For what it's worth, I understood the parent post to
| specifically be referring to instances like Stalinism,
| Maoism, etc. since it says specifically "communist
| dictatorship".
| uoaei wrote:
| I suspect there was a sneaky edit between the time of my
| reply and the time you read it.
| darkwater wrote:
| Just read your sibling comment, talking about gulags or
| it is not communism...
| 88913527 wrote:
| You can make improvements, but it ends up being small things
| that you can showcase to leaders to demonstrate that progress
| is happening, but it's nothing of actual material value. It's a
| lot like public political discourse where a policy solution is
| touted, all the ooh's and ahh's, but then nothing really
| changes.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Yep, I have found the same over my career. It's better than
| nothing, I agree on that, but it still ends up being
| infuriating because _it 's so damned slow_.
|
| Truth is, everyone just wants to clock out and go home. CEOs
| included.
| theodric wrote:
| > People find a cushy place to work in with a good salary, then
| just work their way up the economical ladder (or the
| organizational) and will do anything that's needed to achieve
| that goal. It's as simple as that, and I am convinced that a
| good chunk of these people (probably 20%-30%) are very well
| aware they are bullshitters but they think they have no choice.
|
| Look, I don't mind if you write about me, but it didn't have to
| be so on-the-nose. No chill, these HN people, no chill at
| all...
| pdimitar wrote:
| It's fine, man, I get it -- family to feed, goals to achieve,
| house to buy.
|
| I mostly hate the game, and only part of the players.
| Loggias wrote:
| I'm curious now which article you're referring to at the end of
| your comment. I know "Bullshit Jobs" only from the book by
| David Graeber, which is definitely worth a read for anyone
| interested in the topic.
| oblio wrote:
| Centuries? Try hundreds of thousands of years. We've been
| social and hierarchical creatures since back when we were great
| apes.
| pdimitar wrote:
| At this point, I am mostly preferring what the great apes of
| our age have in terms of a social structure... At least there
| is some merit there, not just who screams the loudest and
| packs the hardest punch.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| The other answer is risk: large, poorly reversible changes can
| go wrong and there will be blame. Even if there is golden
| parachute, within the respective social group that matters -
| and to regulators where applicable.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Well, thicker skin is one option. I have no problem admitting
| fault when I thought I can help but ended up harming
| something. However, that also happened extremely rarely.
|
| People are just way too risk-averse. Though I get why the
| useless managers are like that, they don't want anything
| shining a light on their team more than absolutely necessary
| because they know they could be the first ones on the
| chopping block should an objective analysis ever take place.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Someone just managing a team isn't really in any way
| "management". Usually would have very limited power for
| anything as a team leader. Lower than divisional leadership
| is often much more administrative than anything of
| "executive" function.
|
| And, btw., things like delayering are fairly typical
| efficiency drives. So these "management" positions might
| not be that stable to start with.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > At the same time, I've known a few company owners long time
| ago who were just BEGGING their managers to tell them the
| problems exactly as they are, swore on their lives they will
| not fire the managers for bringing them bad news (and made
| contracts that made sure of it in no uncertain terms)... and
| yet all of the managers below those people were sycophant yes-
| men.
|
| Contracts are insufficient here. A contract doesn't prevent my
| boss from being unhappy with me and making my life miserable. A
| contract does not ensure promotion. As an employee, there is no
| upside for risk, making any risk unacceptable.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Yep, I get that, but what should an open-minded company owner
| do?
|
| They can't exactly promise "you will all be here for 5 years,
| guaranteed, no matter what" too, because for most Homo
| Sapiens that's a signal to immediately become useless.
|
| My point is similar to yours: that the incentives are indeed
| not aligned, and that this is quite tragic because even when
| some people make an honest try to break the vicious cycle
| they still get treated like everyone else.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Employee ownership/performance bonuses. Dramatically
| changes the incentives. I would act enormously differently
| if I got 10% of savings I identified.
| campbel wrote:
| Part of the problem has to be that as an individual in an
| organization it seems like a better ROI for your effort to grow
| your share of the pie than the entire pie itself.
|
| Individual incentives are naturally going to be aligned by
| advancement and "being difficult" is something everyone wants
| to avoid. Easier to shed blame and avoid accountability than
| try to fix the social and political structure of your
| organization. Mostly because even if you succeed, the
| organization wouldn't be sophisticated enough to understand and
| credit you for the work.
| hooverd wrote:
| Your reward for growing the pie is one (1) pizza pie.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| pdimitar wrote:
| So, financial incentives as I said.
|
| As for "being difficult", yeah, that's a huge culture problem
| of many Westerners. It's also a very nasty problem because
| everyone believes in it; I too had managers who literally
| told me to "stop being difficult" when all I did was asking,
| twice over the course of an entire month, about why aren't we
| given just a little more bandwidth to deal with a problem
| that slows down half the company.
|
| But as we know, culture problems are extremely slow to be
| solved and that's why I don't blame people for coasting on
| salary and doing the bare minimum.
|
| Tragedy of the commons, Prisoner's dilemma, Peter's
| principle, we can call it whatever, it's still very sad
| though.
| borroka wrote:
| I work for a company that employs 100k people.
|
| The effects of my work strategy and behavior on the company's
| revenue, profit, vision, products are zero.
|
| On the contrary, the effects of my work strategy and behavior
| on my salary and position can be quite pronounced.
|
| My company can fire me tomorrow, they will forget my name in
| 5 days. To "fire" my company, I need to find another job,
| maybe in another city, working with colleagues I don't know
| who may eat food at lunch break I don't like the smell of.
|
| It is not hard to guess where I spend most of my efforts and
| thinking.
| repomies69 wrote:
| > My company can fire me tomorrow, they will forget my name
| in 5 days. To "fire" my company, I need to find another
| job, maybe in another city, working with colleagues I don't
| know who may eat food at lunch break I don't like the smell
| of.
|
| I don't think is very good comparison, generally. Some
| other company could offer you a job and you can leave any
| time. Depending on your tasks, the company might have very
| difficult time finding replacement personnel. This could be
| very significant (relative) cost for the company.
|
| Personally I have always lived in countries where employee
| protection laws are very employee-friendly. Companies can't
| just fire people at will, they need good reasons. There
| might be significant fines for misfiring for wrong reasons.
| borroka wrote:
| It is a very good comparison (I work in California, at-
| will contracts).
|
| The effect of me leaving my company and the effect of my
| company leaving me, for the one who is getting dropped,
| are not even remotely comparable.
|
| The negative effects of my leaving or being laid
| off/fired on the company of 100k people are, more often
| than not, not distinguishable from zero. Many folks left
| my group and other groups I worked in and, invariably,
| the escapees were barely remembered a few weeks after
| leaving. The cemetery is full of indispensable people,
| and I was never told that I was indispensable.
|
| The negative effects of my dismissal by the company on me
| range from almost zero (I wanted to leave anyway, I have
| ten other jobs lined up, they offer me more money) to
| very substantial (I didn't want to leave, I can't pay my
| mortgage, my partner sees me as a failure).
|
| I respect the company I work for and my colleagues. But
| if I have to choose between advancing my cause and
| advancing the cause of the company (assuming the two
| causes are somewhat misaligned and assuming I am not
| doing anything considered "wrong"), I choose myself every
| day of the week and twice on Sunday
| xmcqdpt2 wrote:
| > The negative effects of my leaving or being laid
| off/fired on the company of 100k people are, more often
| than not, not distinguishable from zero. Many folks left
| my group and other groups I worked in and, invariably,
| the escapees were barely remembered a few weeks after
| leaving. The cemetery is full of indispensable people,
| and I was never told that I was indispensable.
|
| In fact, I'd go as far as to say that having
| "indispensable people" at all is a management failure.
| Large corporations that have been around for decades have
| survived because they don't have indispensable people.
|
| This is why you don't get more money even if you outcode
| everyone on your team. The company doesn't want a
| rockstar developer, it much prefers having 4 average devs
| (where "average" obviously varies a lot based on the
| company and how much they pay etc.) It's simple risk
| management: the company knows it can recruit another
| average dev if it needs to.
| pdimitar wrote:
| You are right that it makes perfect business sense to not
| have indispensable people. At the same time, trying to
| make everyone inter-replaceable has never worked and
| never will.
|
| It is important to recognize that some people are heavier
| hitters than others.
|
| Their risk management goes too far is what I am saying.
| They should relax it a little bit and they'll get better
| results.
| konschubert wrote:
| I respect that you probably have loved ones to take care
| of, and that what you are doing is probably a responsible
| choice.
|
| Don't hate the player, etc.
|
| But damn, if it isn't depressing to go to work every day
| and not caring about impact, just impression.
| borroka wrote:
| It is not black and white, both morally and in terms of
| the way I work.
|
| Let's say that certain choices, strongly supported by my
| boss, who is ultimately responsible for my career in the
| short term (and the short term career consequences of my
| actions then inform my career even further down the
| line), are seen by me as not particularly brilliant,
| maybe even "dumb." If I say nothing and nothing happens,
| the product we are developing may not work as well as it
| could, perhaps the company's revenue will drop by a 50th
| of a percent. But should I risk my career to tell my boss
| that their ideas are not brilliant?
|
| Years ago, when I was younger and more idealistic, I
| would have expressed my opinion on the choices made, even
| forcefully so. After I got fired at one of my previous
| jobs, I tend to side with the boss, strategically.
|
| And before anyone, legitimately, thinks I am a coward or
| a "bloodsucker," let me make it clear that I was not the
| one who put my boss in the position they are in, the
| company is not mine, and the company can fire me tomorrow
| for any reason, even for no reason. Then, maybe at some
| point it will be too much to handle and I will decide to
| leave, but as I wrote, it is not black and white.
| badpun wrote:
| > Years ago, when I was younger and more idealistic, I
| would have expressed my opinion on the choices made, even
| forcefully so. After I got fired at one of my previous
| jobs, I tend to side with the boss, strategically.
|
| Perhaps I'm a natural-born sycophant, but I always
| understood that my primary role in the company is to
| serve/help my boss, and, most notably, making him look
| good in from of his boss.
|
| Incidentally, I'm already financially independent and
| retired at 42 yo.
| borroka wrote:
| It is mostly a matter of personality. I consider myself
| very competent, after decades of study, and brilliant,
| and silencing my competence in order to achieve "labor
| peace" has been a tough sandwich to swallow.
|
| Today, I see my competence as a tool that has allowed me
| to be in the position I am in, which is enough.
| smeej wrote:
| I think you just gave words to something I'd noticed
| about myself but had never been able to articulate, which
| is the reason I can't operate in large companies. Every
| time a company gets past its first thousand employees, I
| have to find another job, because it starts to become as
| you describe and it feels like it grinds my soul to dust.
|
| I'm convinced there do need to be big companies,
| therefore I'm glad so many people can work in them and I
| appreciate the difficulty of it. This is not meant as a
| criticism in any way.
|
| It just helped me understand why my career has consisted
| largely of startup-hopping every couple years as the
| companies finally reach a point where I have more than
| three layers of management, a majority of whom have no
| idea how to do my job effectively, but have to prove
| they're "doing something" by telling me what to do.
|
| It's not that I'm "flaky" or "have commitment issues."
| It's that there's something that happens to companies
| when they get large that turns a work environment I
| enjoyed into one that's really (intolerably) unpleasant
| for me.
| borroka wrote:
| If I were interested in doing the work I am able to do,
| and if my life satisfaction depended on this fulfillment,
| I would never work where I work. That would be
| intolerably frustrating.
|
| But I see my work as a means to other ends, and I am fine
| with my current situation.
| rini17 wrote:
| The endless search of The Meaning and the general
| futility of it with never ending doubts are depressing
| too.
| konschubert wrote:
| Or you just do some work that you enjoy and don't worry
| too much about meaning.
|
| Thinking about how I look to my boss is not work that I
| enjoy.
| binary132 wrote:
| Wisdom is realizing that fixing the social and political
| structure of the org is often against the interests of enough
| people, or at least troublesome enough, that ultimately a lot
| of people will fight to maintain a pathological status quo,
| and actively subvert reform, instead.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| Yeah perverse financial incentives describe 99% of the
| stupidity we put up with daily. Like, why when you look at the
| labeling of a bottle of Tylenol do you find a description of
| the trademarks, a non-discrimination clause, and several
| paragraphs regarding liability in imaginary scenarios written
| in impenetrable legalese? But, it's impossible to find the
| actual dosage chart?
|
| Which one will kill you if you get it wrong?
|
| Which one does the manufacturer think is important?
|
| Why are those never the same?
| astrange wrote:
| I'm 100% sure my Tylenol bottles have dosage charts on them,
| not only because it's so easy to fatally overdose on it but
| also because manufacturing it is extremely regulated and
| nobody cares what the manufacturers think about anything.
| throw9away6 wrote:
| It's there but not easy to find
| hotnfresh wrote:
| They used to be easy to find, but some years back they
| redesigned seemingly all pill bottles to hide the
| instructions. It's a frustration and makes me wish ill on
| whoever is behind it, every single time I need to use
| such a medicine.
| throw9away6 wrote:
| Sometimes it's not even on the bottle but on the panthlet
| that comes with it
| astrange wrote:
| > I keep remembering this old article -- "Bullshit Jobs" -- and
| yep, it still rings true to this day, and will likely do so for
| decades more, likely centuries even because our societal
| changes are slower than glaciers...
|
| That idea is fake, Graeber is a moron, and it's rude to look at
| other people's work and conclude that it's useless just because
| you don't personally watch them all day.
| isthispermanent wrote:
| David Graeber, the author of Debt, is a moron?
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| Just a run-of-the-mil humanities professor aka social
| activist.
| astrange wrote:
| Yes, that one's bad too.
|
| But the main evidence for this is that he's an anarchist.
| Graeber is not around to defend this position seeing as
| he's not alive, but anarchists are all very happy to talk
| about their philosophy, they will answer any question you
| give them, and their answers instantly disprove it and show
| they shouldn't be trusted to implement any of it. Like if
| you ask where insulin comes from they'll just say doctors
| will make it in their backyards as a hobby.
|
| Recent example of this is Seattle's CHAZ where the police
| went away for a few weeks, they posted some anarchist
| guards, and they instantly shot and killed a black teenager
| because they thought he was a criminal.
| flagrant_taco wrote:
| That's a pretty big caricature of anarchists. I'd expect
| an anarchist to say something to the effect of businesses
| creating insulin if there's enough market demand for it.
|
| You seem to assume that businesses, markets, and
| innovation are tied to governments and couldn't exist
| without the powerful hand of authority making them exist.
| Governments can help all of these things, but they can
| also hurt them, and government absolutely didn't invent
| any of them.
|
| The Chop wasn't any real attempt at anarchy. It was a
| protest that took a weird turn and a city that let it
| happen. There was absolutely no plan or expectation that
| it'd be anything other than a stunt trying to make a
| point. You don't cut off a handful of blocks in a
| landlocked and largely residential area and call it a
| government free zone while being completely dependent on
| the government-controlled area around you.
| achenet wrote:
| I'm personally a big fan of his books, but I've read on
| various internet sources that some people will accuse him
| of not being academically rigorous enough. I honestly don't
| have enough expertise or energy to really judge.
| hotnfresh wrote:
| I've yet to see a comprehensive critique of either _Debt_
| or _Bullshit Jobs_ that was both damning taken at face
| value, and demonstrated good reading comprehension.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| Sad to see you downvoted here because I completely agree.
| Graeber's book is among if not the worst I've ever read. It
| saddens me that people here take the idea seriously.
| mijoharas wrote:
| Didn't Graeber speak with people who self-reported their jobs
| being "bullshit"? Doesn't really sound like:
|
| > look at other people's work and conclude that it's useless
| just because you don't personally watch them all day.
| astrange wrote:
| Those people were harmlessly bullshitting (or maybe
| demonstrating the concept of revealed preferences), but
| you're still doing it when you take them too seriously and
| proclaim it's a society wide trend.
|
| (Not you personally I mean.)
| pdimitar wrote:
| I dunno man, a manager taking home $500K a year when all
| they ever did was draw charts that NOBODY looked at (not
| even the CEO or the CFO, not once, I asked them; and not
| any of the other managers too) and just to ask us every
| now and then how are things going, seems quite opposite
| to harmless bullshitting.
|
| That guy could have been fired and we would have just
| elected one of us to keep track of several tickets once a
| week and we'd have been better off.
|
| People get assigned to high-paid bullshit jobs all the
| time, and most of them are aware of it and do their best
| to hold on to them. Nothing really complex, it's all
| perverse incentives all the way down.
| hotnfresh wrote:
| There must be bubbles at play. Like some folks just don't
| closely know enough people in enough parts of the economy
| to see what the other bubble sees, so assumes they're
| wrong or exaggerating just to have a laugh or something.
|
| There are definitely bullshit jobs, and jobs that are
| mostly bullshit.
| tuatoru wrote:
| > I've known a few company owners long time ago who ... swore
| on their lives they will not fire the managers for bringing
| them bad news
|
| It needs to go further. Fire everyone who says there are no
| problems. If there are no problems, why is an under-manager
| needed? Also fire everyone who makes up bullshit problems.
|
| If you're going to agree with me all the time, why do I need
| you?
| l0b0 wrote:
| Too easy to game: People are just going to gauge for
| themselves what management considers "not a bullshit problem"
| and report that, making sure that the blame rests on
| unpopular people or third parties.
|
| Too prone to false positives: Any project which is genuinely
| going really well results in everyone getting fired, and the
| company absolutely tanks as a result.
| campbel wrote:
| Exactly, an effective CEO / Executive is going to be
| developing systems of accountability that align with
| company goals. It can't be based entirely on a set of
| gameable metrics. However this starts at the top. An
| incompetent board / CEO is going to create misaligned
| incentives which will cascade through the organization.
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| It seems to me that if you want to be a CEO that wants to
| stay connected at the ground level, then you have to
| actually do that: you have to know each engineer, and
| understand the work they're doing on any given day.
| Naturally, this tightly constrains the possible size of
| the company. If you want to grow beyond that size you
| must accept that you will become disconnected and out of
| touch and all of the bs being discussed here will
| inevitably creep in.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| If the culture of the company is checked-out people doing
| some nonsense to get a paycheck, you're not going to fix that
| by tough love unless you will actually fire 80% of the
| company. What really happens is you fire some useless people
| but who made someone's life at work easier or more fun and
| now everyone who is somewhat competent will start looking for
| a better job.
| flagrant_taco wrote:
| Teams can actually function well and have no problems for
| periods of time. I those cases you would almost certainly
| break that by firing the manager.
|
| I think everyone would agree that yes-people are useless for
| a team, but if you find yourself surrounded by them you have
| to ask why. Either you hired poorly, or more likely the way
| you treat you team and/or company creates a culture of fear
| and dishonesty.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Who is that "you" who hired poorly? I am a programmer, I
| did not hire anyone.
|
| My comment from much above, to which many people replied,
| was from the point of view of a working programmer.
| flagrant_taco wrote:
| I was just assuming you were talking about managers not
| independent contributors. The "you" would be the person
| with the authority to fire though, as a working
| programmer would have absolutely no power to fire anyone
| saying there are no problems.
| charlie0 wrote:
| The good managers very much reminds me of this skit
| https://youtu.be/DYvhC_RdIwQ?si=Ex-kiOcrnA3PVsgI
| lordnacho wrote:
| This is why I'm thinking we need a new system. Not capitalism,
| not communism, not anything that's already been talked about
| for 200 years.
|
| It seems to me that our real problem is that we are wired to
| demand everybody contributes. Both righties and lefties
| actually agree on this, they just have different views on how
| to get it done theoretically, and in practice have also come up
| with various schemes to make this happen.
|
| But actually we live in a world of plenty. Yes, there are
| hungry people. Yes, there are people who don't have an iPhone.
|
| But what do I mean? I mean that in general it appears to me
| that almost everything is produced by a very small number of
| people. We're no longer living in a world where you need 9
| people to feed 10 people. The same is true for a lot of goods
| and services. We don't actually need a bunch of people to do
| many things.
|
| Quite a lot of processes, if you ask someone who works in
| various industries, are really done by a few people, supported
| by a cast of extras that outnumbers them. Some of these extras
| make more money than the people actually doing the useful work.
| Often these extras are are like you allude to, only there in
| order to pretend they are part of the process so that they can
| make a living.
|
| To make things worse, there actually is a class of people who
| have no job at all, which creates a kind of fear among the
| hangers-on.
|
| What we actually need is to have productive people unimpeded by
| people who need to scrape a living. We should change our norms
| so that if you aren't selected to be one of the people who
| makes iPhones or grow food, you can just be good friend. If you
| want to be an iPhone maker, study and try to get in there. If
| you don't make it, you're not a failure. You just go about
| living while all the robot designers take care of stuff.
| smeej wrote:
| So "from each according to their ability, to each according
| to their need"?
|
| I hate to tell you this, but you've very much missed your
| target of "not something that's already been talked about for
| 200 years."
|
| Who does the selecting? Who says, "You, there! You shall
| devote your time to programming robots, so your neighbors can
| 'be good friends' and have meaningful relationships. Buck up,
| comrade. Look how good it will be for everyone (...else)!"?
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Also,
|
| > To make things worse, there actually is a class of people
| who have no job at all, which creates a kind of fear among
| the hangers-on.
|
| Is a rephrasing of Marx's idea of the reserve army of
| labor. They are the lumpen who _could_ be used as
| replacements but mostly aren't.
|
| I do mostly agree with GP's main point. The skill floor for
| meaningful work--even before this recent round of AI
| hullabaloo--has increased to the point where there are many
| people unemployable at any wage.
| lordnacho wrote:
| I'll admit this isn't fully fleshed out. I've yet to design
| the gulags.
|
| But the core of it is a change of focus away from "everyone
| must contribute as much as they can" which the lefties also
| support. It's more the recognition that actually we could
| (maybe!) get more done if we didn't insist on everyone
| doing something.
| pierat wrote:
| What you're trying to create needs to deal with this now
| simple fact:
|
| Creation of a thing costs a lot of time and resource.
|
| Copying said thing is trivial to the point of free.
|
| (This is the biggest difference between our current
| culture, and previous years. Copying is effectively
| free.)
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Abolish IP and treat ideas the same way bacteria swap
| their plasmids.
| pierat wrote:
| Doing that means you used to get the medieval and
| renaissance guild systems.
|
| However, we already have countries that ignore
| copyright/patent/trademark (China). The new solution is
| to remove features from devices, and to tie them into
| some cloudshit.
|
| We get some dog-and-pony show that cloud means we get new
| features, but in reality, it's just an anti-cloning
| tactic.
| lordnacho wrote:
| This is only true in IP heavy areas, isn't it? You still
| need effort to pull ore out of a mountain.
| lapcat wrote:
| See also: "in communist society, where nobody has one
| exclusive sphere of activity but each can become
| accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the
| general production and thus makes it possible for me to do
| one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the
| morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening,
| criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever
| becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic."
| https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8116796-for-as-soon-as-
| the-...
| datavirtue wrote:
| Relax, socialism is fine.
| TerrifiedMouse wrote:
| Capitalism in theory doesn't support jobs that produce no
| value. Shareholders would have demanded that waste be
| optimized out of the company.
| flagrant_taco wrote:
| That sounds like a lovely version of capitalism, but the
| one I've experienced is anything but optimized. There can
| be incentives to keeping around unproductive jobs, the size
| and stability of an org can often be used as a basic sign
| of health.
|
| See: AT&T
| bluecheese452 wrote:
| In theory reality and theory are the same. In reality they
| are not. In my org there are a lot of pms who don't do very
| much and somehow just happen to be friends and former room-
| mates of the org head.
| lordnacho wrote:
| And yet everyone can think of someone who has been
| handsomely paid for producing no value.
|
| The theory is wrong, basically, if that's what it says.
| TerrifiedMouse wrote:
| Just because you don't see the value doesn't mean there
| is none.
|
| Granted bad deals get made from time to time.
| Supermancho wrote:
| Yes, the correct observation is that no economic system
| operates at optimum across every vector.
|
| > Just because you don't see the value doesn't mean there
| is none.
|
| Sometimes it is absolutely true, which is most often seen
| in nepotism but also in categorically stupid people (re:
| Bonhoeffer).
| pdimitar wrote:
| No, those bad deals are likely at least 50%, maybe even
| 80%.
|
| I've seen way too many PMs and middle managers twiddling
| their thumbs and just inventing tasks and reports just so
| they are busy and are not fired.
|
| How do I know? We had some of them go to a conference
| once; they were all gone for two weeks.
|
| Work was going faster and smoother.
|
| And that's not a single anecdote, it's supported by many
| other programmers.
|
| Truth is, nepotism and "we've been buddies at the uni" is
| happening much more than you are willing to admit.
| hotnfresh wrote:
| Those lovely market forces largely stop applying at
| corporation boundaries.
|
| Besides, information is so wildly far from perfect in all
| spheres that we rarely see anything particularly close to
| the extremes of efficient behavior predicted by spherical-
| cow market fairy tales anyway, even when market forces
| _are_ fully in-play.
| pdimitar wrote:
| I am sure shareholders are demanding that in many places
| but they are demanding it from the people who provide no
| value themselves and who are perfectly positioned to
| inflate their importance and perceived value-add.
|
| That's like asking the corrupt politicians to uproot
| corruption. Obviously it will never work.
|
| So the shareholders get bulshitted exactly by the people
| who are very likely superfluous.
| xmcqdpt2 wrote:
| This is actually a very well known problem in management,
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_pro
| b...
|
| The shareholders are uninformed and disorganized. They
| might take their money out but that will take a long time.
| Meanwhile, management and the board control the flow of
| information and can take decisions together.
| throw9away6 wrote:
| The concept of a voting shareholder is a myth. Most shares
| are owned/managed by funds so they are the true voters.
| They just vote to make sure the that the boat isn't rocked
| too much.
| anticensor wrote:
| Even in those cases, there are eventual beneficial owners
| which are indeed real natural persons.
| badpun wrote:
| > I mean that in general it appears to me that almost
| everything is produced by a very small number of people.
| We're no longer living in a world where you need 9 people to
| feed 10 people.
|
| This is only true for complex positions, where it's almost
| impossible for management to suss out individual employee's
| impact. Vast majority of jobs are not like that - they're
| driving trucks, stocking shelves, processing paperwork in
| some government job, driving farm equipment, assemblying
| smartphones, selling retail financial products etc.
| achenet wrote:
| uh iPhones aren't just made by well dressed Stanford educated
| designers and engineers in California, you know. The number
| of people needed to mine the metal/silicon for them, to make
| the circuits (and to build the factories which make the
| circuits), and to actually assemble them (for example [0]),
| the global supply chain of container ships and port personnel
| and police forces to fight piracy... it's a lot of people. I
| think they outnumber the bullshit KPR middle managers that
| get demonized here.
|
| Now just to be clear, I'm not saying that bullshit jobs don't
| exist - they do. And maybe a world with universal basic
| income would reduce these bullshit jobs and generally make
| everything nicer.
|
| But the iPhone needs *a lot* of really non-bullshit, totally
| serious hard work by thousands if not millions of people to
| exist, many of them getting paid ridiculously low wages and
| working under what I would consider inhuman conditions (12
| hour days, etc... I should mention that I'm French, so
| perhaps used to slightly cushier worker protections than most
| people). And I think there are more underpaid, overworked
| Chinese factory workers than there are are "VPs of corporate
| happiness".
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn#Mainland_China
| lordnacho wrote:
| The fact that there's a lot of real jobs making iPhones
| just means there's a lot of BS jobs that will hang onto
| them.
|
| Of course it's true, you need a LOT of specialists to make
| iPhones.
|
| I would also wager that a lot of real jobs are lost because
| there's a tradeoff between gunning for such a job and just
| settling for a moocher job. Some of those real jobs would
| consist of automating away the assembly line jobs. It's
| just that we don't have that society yet, so the manager
| who doesn't know how to do the automation hires miners and
| assembly workers, who are obliged to do something in order
| to make a living.
| achenet wrote:
| I'm _really_ skeptical that it 's easy to automate those
| assembly line jobs away, or to automate mining. For one
| thing, robots are expensive to build. For another, while
| it's possible to make robots do tasks like that, there's
| a good chance they'll be less efficient at them than
| humans. And of course, if you're profit driven, given the
| choice between paying foreign sweatshop workers
| starvation wages on a high margin product and blowing
| billions on a risky R&D project that has a 50% chance of
| not working and a 50% chance of being copied by all your
| competitors if it does (assuming you develop something
| that's _actually cheaper_ than cheap wage slave labor,
| which is far from a given) is pretty obvious...
|
| that said, if you can actually build an iPhone factory
| that doesn't need workers, I'm believe there are many big
| companies willing to pay you a small fortune for that.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Well yeah, it's not easy right now, because we are doing
| precisely what you are saying, basically short term
| optimization.
|
| Not saying that hasn't served us well for a long time,
| but I think there are improvements we could make in our
| society.
| v-erne wrote:
| >> I'm really skeptical that it's easy to automate those
| assembly line jobs away
|
| I think most people here on HN does not see this because
| they tend to do software related work, but this is
| happening faster that you may think.
|
| When I last time spoke with middle level manager of
| building company that specializes in constructing
| factories in Central Europe he said that change over last
| 20 years is almost magical - factory built at the start
| of millenium required hundreds people to operate.
| Projects finished two decades laters can easily operate
| with 20 people or less.
|
| And this is East/Central Europe - probably least
| automated part of developed world.
|
| If you look at Japan you can see things such as fully
| automated ps 4/5 production lines (
| https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/PlayStation-s-
| sec... )
| brabel wrote:
| You're describing https://www.thevenusproject.com/
|
| Are you aware of that or you just came up with the same basic
| idea (a resource-based economy)?
| lordnacho wrote:
| Never heard of it, I'll check it out
| [deleted]
| politelemon wrote:
| I am intrigued by the spreadsheet to control infrastructure bit.
|
| > the engineers responsible for it elected to use spreadsheets to
| control the infrastructure
|
| Can you explain what this means, how would you control infra
| through spreadsheets? Is it something like terraform... You
| change a '1' to a '2' in a particular cell and some script
| queries that XLSX and notice the change and create a new EC2?
| gawa wrote:
| Not OP, but shokingly, what you describe _does_ exist. Or at
| least something similar for managing kubernetes. [0]
|
| In my own experience, I at least once found one slack app that
| was configured throught spreadsheet. [1] It actually worked
| quite well.
|
| Although in this context, I assume that by "infrastructure", OP
| was probably refering to the whole configuration of some
| Microsoft tools (PowerBI). I don't think it was about
| provisionning infrastructure. But I'm not familiar with PowerBI
| so it's only my guess. I would also love to hear more about
| InfrastructureAsSpreadsheet, if anyone have fun or horror
| stories to share :)
|
| [0] https://github.com/learnk8s/xlskubectl [1]
| https://emmti.com/tiny-elf-a-slack-bot-with-google-sheets-an...
| simpaticoder wrote:
| People are naturally strangely shaped. When they join a large
| organization, they must fit into a Voronoi diagram[1]. Shape is a
| metaphor for both degrees-of-freedom and for knowledge. This is
| also, funnily enough, a good way to describe cell packing in
| plants, incl. trees.
|
| One striking example of a role requiring deep behavioral and
| epistemic changes is that of a judge. A judge must learn to edit
| their memory and learn to _not know things_. I find this striking
| because you 'd think that, objectively, knowing more is better.
| But the rules of court have decided this is not true. If you want
| that job, you will do this. (It's not all bad: any lawyer will
| tell you of the risk-minimizing bliss of _not knowing things_.)
|
| The behavioral adjustments - mostly behavioral _losses_ - are
| usually not so strange. Usually they are a peon to tribal
| socialization. In a tribe there are rules that aren 't 'fair'
| because they do not reference the details of the specific
| conflict, who's right or wrong. The rules are simpler than that,
| making reference only to relationships and "who started it". You
| don't dis the leader, you don't pick fights, and absolutely never
| pick a fight with leader-favored members, etc.
|
| The OP hints at the proper viewpoint, but then diverges. They are
| strange structures with lots of rustling leaves. But he does not
| perceive the value and origin of these structures on their own
| terms. One must take the view of a zoologist observing the
| behavior of a parasite, or a slime-mold. It is a mistake to
| anthropomorphize them, just as it is a mistake to
| anthropomorphize human social structures.
|
| 1 - https://github.com/d3/d3-voronoi
| skrebbel wrote:
| Blog posts like these are a staple on HN and I'm always mildly
| offended by them.
|
| It seems to me that there's a class of programmer that will take
| an overpaid job at a terrible BigCo, spend their evenings writing
| ranty blog posts about how terrible it all is, culminating in the
| inevitable "I quit" article, only subsequently to accept a job at
| a _different_ terrible BigCo.
|
| At no point does this article, or most articles like it, do any
| effort to realize that things are not always like this. Even if
| there is some unavoidable law that huge companies inevitably fill
| their ranks with idiots, like this article suggests, _you do not
| need to work at a huge company_.
|
| Most people do not work at huge companies. There's lots of
| amazing tech companies with fulfilling jobs and they want you,
| now. But there's this super prevalent idea that keeps getting
| pumped around the blogosphere that it's absolutely impossible to
| not work at a terrible huge company and therefore you cannot
| possibly escape, and I quote, "going home and despairing".
|
| There's some weird kind of suffer porn going on here that's just
| unnecessary. If you choose to trade your sanity for a high salary
| then go right ahead but don't act like you had no choice.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Not to forget the inevitable techbro complaining about being
| unable to support a family and buy a house at anything below
| 500k per year. Or being able to retire...
| indymike wrote:
| >It seems to me that there's a class of programmer that will
| take an overpaid job at a terrible BigCo,
|
| People are bad at understanding risk. When a company pays
| significantly more for the same job than another, there is
| always an economic reason:
|
| * The job is undesirable because of how people are treated, and
| as a result the only way to attract and retain people is to
| overpay. The extra pay mitigates flight risk when the
| inevitable bad day or week happens for the hire.
|
| * Management is likely to or has a history of sudden lay offs
| and firings often indiscriminately. The extra pay mitigates the
| risk of sudden loss of income to the employee.
|
| * Poor reputation/employment brand requires paying more to get
| people to avoid the risk of associating with that bad employer
| brand.
|
| The extra money is being paid not because the employer wants
| to. It is exactly because they have to in order to hire and
| retain people that can do the job. The whole "we're better and
| pay a premium because you are the best developers in the world"
| is really management self-justifying having to overpay due to
| risk.
|
| When you look at compensation, ask yourself and the interviewer
| why is the company over-paying? You'll often save yourself
| years of misery.
| Aurornis wrote:
| This is true, but it got very temporarily skewed in recent
| years at some companies that had a lot of cash flow. There
| really were companies hiring a lot of highly qualified people
| mostly to have large teams of highly qualified people.
|
| The rubber band is snapping back, though. Layoffs are hitting
| all of these companies and expectations are rising quickly.
| Inevitably, companies paying a lot of money for people will
| expect to get their money's worth out of them.
| Draiken wrote:
| If we lived in a world where money wasn't so important I would
| fully agree with you.
|
| But it is.
|
| I can't earn the same as you all can because I don't live in
| the US, but if I did I would grind all the leetcode (as
| insulting as I find them) for one single reason: I don't want
| to work forever.
|
| So I agree with some other comments here. No it's not really a
| choice.
|
| Choosing to earn less and hope for a lottery ticket win like
| being an early employee in a unicorn startup is not a real
| plan. It's wishful thinking.
|
| I hate this is the world we live in and my soul dies a bit
| every day I have to waste my talents writing useless software,
| but there's no real choice.
| lapcat wrote:
| > I don't live in the US, but if I did I would grind all the
| leetcode (as insulting as I find them) for one single reason:
| I don't want to work forever.
|
| > So I agree with some other comments here. No it's not
| really a choice.
|
| Literally hundreds of millions of Americans retire on much
| less than than BigCo compensation.
| Draiken wrote:
| Are they retiring with the same standard of living they had
| before?
|
| Can they sustain a medical emergency?
|
| Can they pay for their kids college?
|
| I'm sure some can do all this. But I'm pretty sure most
| can't.
| lapcat wrote:
| > Are they retiring with the same standard of living they
| had before?
|
| This is a strong indicator that choice is a factor,
| despite your protests to the contrary. But what exactly
| do you mean by "standard of living"? For example, when
| you're employed, you have to live where the jobs are, no
| matter how expensive, unless you can get remote work.
| Whereas when you're retired you can live anywhere,
| perhaps a place that is both less expensive and warmer.
|
| Retired people seem less obsessed with collecting more
| material goods (which are often "labor saving" devices,
| of little relevance to those who aren't laboring) and
| focused more on enjoying life, traveling, spending time
| with family, etc. Is that a "worse" standard of living?
| And the children are presumably living on their own, so
| there's less need for bigger homes. (Who wants to spend a
| bunch of time, effort, and money maintaining a big house
| when you're older and also traveling quite a bit?)
|
| > Can they sustain a medical emergency?
|
| Have you heard of Medicare?
|
| > But I'm pretty sure most can't.
|
| Based on what? Do you have economic statistics to back up
| your belief?
| Draiken wrote:
| You're telling me most retired Americans have more than
| hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings?
|
| I'm not gonna dive into stats for that since I'm not an
| American, but I would be thoroughly surprised.
| lapcat wrote:
| > You're telling me most retired Americans have more than
| hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings?
|
| How much do you think you need? I think the
| recommendation is something like 10x your current annual
| income.
|
| > I'm not gonna dive into stats for that since I'm not an
| American
|
| How is your nationality relevant to reading stats? If you
| don't want to, then just say that.
| Draiken wrote:
| 10x? Financial independence is normally at least 20x,
| more like 30x.
|
| > How is your nationality relevant to reading stats? If
| you don't want to, then just say that.
|
| Sorry maybe I wasn't clear, but that's exactly what I
| meant. I won't dig into stats for the US because it's of
| no interest to me. That's why I mentioned I'm not from
| the US.
|
| I know that for my country that's absolutely not the case
| and I'm pretty sure it's the same for most of the world.
| lapcat wrote:
| > 10x? Financial independence is normally at least 20x,
| more like 30x.
|
| You appear to be overlooking Social Security, which is a
| crucial source of income that all US workers pay into
| their entire careers. It's not just savings.
|
| > I won't dig into stats for the US because it's of no
| interest to me.
|
| Yet it's interesting enough to you to make baseless
| empirical claims about the US.
|
| > I know that for my country that's absolutely not the
| case and I'm pretty sure it's the same for most of the
| world.
|
| That's not the way the world works.
| Draiken wrote:
| You seemingly care about this but also can't be bothered
| to bring any empirical evidence for any of your claims.
| Goes both ways.
|
| The US is not that different from everywhere else... we
| all live in the same capitalist hellhole last time I
| checked.
| lapcat wrote:
| > You seemingly care about this but also can't be
| bothered to bring any empirical evidence for any of your
| claims. Goes both ways.
|
| Which claims? That Social Security exists? https://en.wik
| ipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_(United_States... That
| Medicare exists?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_(United_States)
| That 10x savings is the recommendation?
| https://www.fidelity.com/viewpoints/retirement/how-much-
| do-i...
|
| > The US is not that different from everywhere else
|
| Says you, but you apparently aspire to live and work
| here, so it's different enough.
|
| > we all live in the same capitalist hellhole last time I
| checked.
|
| Have you checked North Korea?
| Draiken wrote:
| >Says you, but you apparently aspire to live and work
| here, so it's different enough.
|
| Never said that. It's just where tech salaries are
| bigger.
|
| >Have you checked North Korea?
|
| What does this have to do with anything? Unless you're
| writing from North Korea, this is childish.
|
| Apparently I hit a nerve and that was not my intention.
| My point was never specifically about the US but you keep
| insisting on it and have a bone to grind. That doesn't
| add to the conversation though.
| lapcat wrote:
| > My point was never specifically about the US but you
| keep insisting on it and have a bone to grind.
|
| You said: "I don't live in the US, but if I did I would
| grind all the leetcode (as insulting as I find them) for
| one single reason: I don't want to work forever."
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37809983
|
| My first reply to you was to that comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37810176
|
| The HN thread history doesn't lie. Your point that I
| replied to was specifically about the US.
| Draiken wrote:
| You're interpreting my mention of the US which is
| incidentally where tech salaries are higher as the focus
| of my comment. That's not it.
|
| You could replace that with whatever country could offer
| those salaries.
| Draiken wrote:
| Since you're so adamant I had a quick search and it turns
| out I'm right.
|
| >43.09% of American adults had no retirement savings
| >23.15% of American adults had no (or negative)
| retirement savings even including the extended assets
|
| https://dqydj.com/average-retirement-savings/
|
| Of course you can rely on some government assistance but
| arguing that's a good enough standard is a bit of a
| stretch.
| lapcat wrote:
| > Since you're so adamant I had a quick search and it
| turns out I'm right.
|
| No, you changed the subject. You said:
|
| > You're telling me most retired Americans have more than
| hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings?
|
| To which the answer is no, but you don't need a million
| dollars to retire.
|
| Whereas your link is not about retired Americans, it's
| about _UN_ -retired Americans: "Statistics are for
| households headed by adults aged 32-61 at the time of the
| survey".
|
| I'm done with this conversation. Your games and lack of
| good faith interest are becoming very tedious to me.
| Draiken wrote:
| Read the article. It's about people that will retire.
| Unless you're trying to be facetious and say they'll
| never retire, which I guess will be true for many.
| lapcat wrote:
| > Read the article. It's about people that will retire.
|
| Yes, and the point that everyone is trying to explain to
| you, which you refuse to acknowledge, is that in general,
| software developers in the US are doing fine. They don't
| need to "grind all the leetcode" and work for a BigCo.
| It's a _choice_ not a financial mandate. Software
| developers, even outside of BigCos, are in the upper
| income brackets in the US.
|
| I'm not saying that _everyone_ in the US is doing fine as
| far as retirement is concerned, but the idea that
| software developers have to work for BigCos is absurd. I
| 've never worked for a BigCo, and I'm doing fine.
| Draiken wrote:
| Well now you're moving the goalpost. Your original
| comment mentioned hundreds of millions of Americans so it
| can't be only about software developers. That's why the
| focus changed to everyone.
|
| Anyways, yes you have the choice of not working on big
| corps. My point is that it's not a real choice unless you
| want to accept all of the consequences of leaving all
| that money on the table. You have to accept the risk that
| you might be a few emergencies away from bankruptcy.
| lapcat wrote:
| > yes you have the choice of not working on big corps.
|
| Finally admitting the truth.
|
| > You have to accept the risk that you might be a few
| emergencies away from bankruptcy.
|
| Working for a BigCo doesn't magically protect you from
| emergencies. Accumulating $millions might protect you,
| but you don't just walk in the door of a BigCo and pick
| up your treasure chest. You have to work there for many
| years. In the meantime, you're subject to the same risks
| as everyone else. For example, lot of BigCos have been
| doing layoffs recently, which would put a big dent in the
| "for many years" plan. Also, if you suffer some kind of
| disability that prevents you from continuing to work,
| then you're screwed regardless.
|
| Anyway, what makes you think you would be BigCo material?
| Not everyone is. The number of jobs is limited, and the
| competition is fierce. You might be able to get in the
| door by grinding leetcode, but once you're in the door
| you still need to make management happy in order to keep
| your job and win pay raises. The grind doesn't end.
| Draiken wrote:
| God the amount of unnecessary hostility coming from you
| is absurd. From my original comment:
|
| > So I agree with some other comments here. No it's not
| really a choice.
|
| From the very beginning I said it's not _really_ a
| choice, but I always acknowledged it. Whatever, your
| pedantry wins.
|
| > Anyway, what makes you think you would be BigCo
| material?
|
| I can't really know since I'm automatically excluded from
| it simply because of I don't live there (and I would
| never work with a visa, having a corporation ruling over
| my life). But it's very possible I wouldn't make the cut,
| or if I did I'd likely be another one writing blog posts
| like this one - assuming reality is how they portray it.
|
| Technically I know I can hold my own, but that's not
| really what work is all about in my experience (barring
| few exceptions). Connections, ivy leagues, kissing ass,
| leetcode and other aspects that shouldn't matter are
| valued more than actually getting shit done.
|
| But I'd sure as hell try because even though it's not a
| guarantee of protection, it's as close as we can get to
| it in a capitalist society. Money is, unfortunately,
| crucial.
| harimau777 wrote:
| > For example, when you're employed, you have to live
| where the jobs are.... Whereas when you're retired you
| can live... [in] a place that is both less expensive and
| warmer.
|
| I think that it may be just the opposite. From what I've
| observed, access to good public transportation is a major
| contributor to quality of life in old age. In the US,
| that requires someone to live in a much higher cost of
| living location.
| lapcat wrote:
| > From what I've observed
|
| What have you observed, and are your observations
| anything but anecdotal?
| hotnfresh wrote:
| The Americans retiring now didn't work in the New Economy
| for most of their working life. Things were _very_
| different.
|
| Let's revisit this comment in 15 years or so.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Even in the US.
|
| It isn't like these opportunities are everywhere.
|
| As much as people pretend, it is in fact not easy to just
| uproot your family and move across the country to work at a
| challenging startup. So there are good engineers that get
| stuck in BigCorp Jobs that do suck your soul, just like these
| online rants depict.
|
| Even stepping back and forgetting the ranting. All big human
| organizations, eventually become bureaucratic, and locked
| into hierarchies, and have a difficult time making decisions.
| And all of these things make IT and writing software very
| difficult. And, because of individual constraints on
| geography, family, etc.. good engineers do get stuck in these
| big organizations, and tend to suffer.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > I don't live in the US, but if I did I would grind all the
| leetcode (as insulting as I find them) for one single reason:
| I don't want to work forever.
|
| I find it funny that the internet exaggerations have
| convinced non-US people that:
|
| 1. Doing a couple LeetCode problems is _the only_ thing
| interviewers look for
|
| 2. Everyone here automatically gets a high paying FAANG-like
| job if they can memorize enough LeetCode problems
|
| 3. All of these jobs just write useless software all day and
| never really do anything productive
|
| and
|
| 4. LeetCode problems are impossibly difficult and it's a
| tragedy that anyone would be asked to code during a coding
| interview.
|
| I struggle to read these threads any more because everything
| seems so stretched out of proportion from the real world. If
| your view of what US development or interviewing culture is
| like comes from HN threads, you'd probably be pleasantly
| surprised by what it's actually like here most of the time.
| The weird catastrophizing that happens on HN and Reddit is
| hyperbole.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| I haven't had a job interview without leetcode bullshit in
| about 15 years. And years before that.
|
| Basically since Joel's posts in the early 2000s. He
| promoted a reasonable idea-that programmers should know how
| to program. Then B and C players rushed to make that
| happen! Similar to how agile became the complete opposite
| of what it meant originally.
| giantg2 wrote:
| At least you have talents. Imagine being in your 30s with a
| family to support and no real career future - bad reviews,
| bad organizations structure, shitty technology/systems, and
| no skills to move elsewhere.
| throaway234 wrote:
| > If we lived in a world where money wasn't so important...
|
| Money being important is not part of the world, it's part of
| you. You even say so a few lines later:
|
| > ... I don't want to work forever.
|
| So yes, you indeed have no choice but to treat money as
| important because... you've chosen to treat money as
| important.
|
| I'm offering this in the hopes that you can stand back and
| look at your need from a distance. What are other ways to
| satisfy this need without you writing useless software _and_
| without money being the main constraint? Get creative!
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Money _is_ kind of important, though, at least to those of
| us who don 't want to depend on a soup kitchen.
|
| Look, money isn't everything. This isn't a video game,
| where the highest score wins, and you chase points just for
| points. But money lets you buy things, and some of those
| things are important - food for yourself and those who
| depend on you, shelter, healthcare. (But there's a bunch of
| stuff that money can buy that isn't important, and learning
| to let go of those things is really healthy.)
|
| So: Money is important, because some of the stuff it can
| buy is important. That's not going to change any time soon.
| neogodless wrote:
| > No it's not really a choice.
|
| Hard disagree. Have never worked for "terrible big company"
| (though some mediocre medium companies!) But outside of the
| super high cost of living areas like NYC and San Francisco,
| it's trivially simple (if not easy) to live on $50-60K USD
| each year (adjust this number for inflation as needed) while
| still enjoying yourself, having high performance technology,
| doing some travel, etc. You can't buy every damn thing you
| want or live like a millionaire, but you can live a great
| life.
|
| How many software / engineering jobs in the U.S., excluding
| terrible big tech companies, pay more than $60k USD per year?
|
| _Almost all of them._ In fact, it 's not hard to make well
| over $100k. And live on half that. So you don't have to work
| forever just because you're not making $500k USD each year at
| some huge terrible tech company.
| anvil-on-my-toe wrote:
| $60-100k salary is not enough to support a family and
| retire; it's probably not enough for a single person to
| make meaningful progress towards retirement because at that
| level of pay home ownership is constantly out of reach and
| inflation outpaces wage growth. It's sacrificing your life
| so someone else can get rich.
| neogodless wrote:
| In today's environment, home prices really seem to be
| getting nuts.
|
| As I said, anyone in software is likely making _over_
| $100K. A $500K house with 20% down would have a P &I
| payment of $2,715 / month (at 7.2%, plus
| taxes/insurance.) That's less than $33K / year. (I bought
| my first house for $155K making $55K / year, and my
| second house for $390K making $100K.) If you're making
| over $100K, and spending under a third of it on housing,
| you should be able to afford to live, unless you're
| careless with your money.
|
| I don't think I'm making _any_ sacrifices in my life,
| because I don 't think of the things you can overspend on
| as sacrifices. As I said, I eat well (at home and at
| restaurants), I travel, I have great technology / toys.
| And at 44 I have a 7 figure net worth. Because I'm still
| spending under $65K USD / year, I could likely live off
| investments in a few more years, though being in
| software, it's easy to continue contracting on my own
| terms and having extra money.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| If you bought in the past, you made it. That doesn't help
| the current generation.
|
| Hundred year-old teardowns are two million in our
| neighborhood. 60+ y-o condos are $800k. Redfin est
| payment/mo: $5,974. Just the property tax and HOA fee is
| over $1,000 a month.
| anvil-on-my-toe wrote:
| $100k for a down payment - how many years of saving does
| that take and what happens to that $500k price tag during
| those years of saving? One hardship like a medical issue,
| a setback in employment, or a child you weren't ready
| for, then what? And I'm not sure you could find a one
| bedroom, one bathroom for $500k in a city with tech jobs.
| neogodless wrote:
| In places where houses are $500K, rent is probably $2000
| / month. (More like $1200 - 5000 / month, but depending
| on the size, location, amenities, luxuriousness of
| fixtures, etc.) If you make _barely_ $100K, and are
| spending $24K on rent, let 's say you spend half of the
| rest on living. That leaves you with $38K savings per
| year. So it takes you 32 months to save up $100K for a
| down payment.
|
| The secret is don't spend all of the money you make. Well
| it's not a secret, but it's also not "normal." It's
| culturally normal to spend all of your money, and then
| wonder why you can't build up savings. But if you're a
| software engineer with an income of 6 figures, you really
| should be able to figure out how to live a good life
| without spending every last dollar.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Does this $100K/yr earner pay no income taxes and FICA
| somehow?
| anvil-on-my-toe wrote:
| You forgot taxes. $38k - $27k in taxes = $11k savings. So
| 9 years to save up, by which time housing inflation will
| have taken the price to ~$700k. You are then $40k short
| for the down payment.
| neogodless wrote:
| Do you know a lot of software engineers that barely make
| $100k?
|
| That's why I'm not getting caught up in the particulars
| of this example.
| anvil-on-my-toe wrote:
| Don't you think it's interesting that taxes dramatically
| skew the example?
|
| Think about people earning $50k - $100k. 37 million
| households in the US. Another 34 million households earn
| less. 128 million households in America total.[1]
|
| 12, give or take 2, years into professional life, you
| sign a 30-year note and cash out all of your savings.
| Wages and cost of living won't be constant, but that's
| basically the optimistic case. Working 42 years to retire
| by owning one basic shelter.
|
| [1]
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/203183/percentage-
| distri...
| SoftTalker wrote:
| There are many people in software that are making under
| $100k
|
| Anyone working in in a government position, or for a
| state university, or for a nonprofit is probably not
| earning $100k except maybe in high COL areas or those
| with quite senior positions.
| phero_cnstrcts wrote:
| In Europe frontend is about 60k annually.
| oooyay wrote:
| It took me about five years to save my down payment. I
| lived very frugally, don't have a wife, don't have a kid,
| I paid less than $20k on note for each of my cars, and do
| not have college debt. I'd say it's fairly difficult if
| you start moving any of the knobs I minimized or set to
| zero above. Even then, after my down payment money was
| tight for the first year because it was _everything_ I
| had.
|
| I got a mortgage similar to what OP mentioned but I have
| a veterans home loan. Most people I know don't have one
| of those, so their mortgage that was gotten at the same
| time as mine is closer to $4k/m.
| ta988 wrote:
| So you are a both a bit of an exception nowadays with no
| family and no debt.
| oooyay wrote:
| I'm largely an exception, yes
| Brystephor wrote:
| Home rates are closer to 8%. The redfin calculator puts a
| $490k home near me at just under $3200/mo with 20% down.
|
| So over $36k a year. I'm in Washington, so no income tax.
| Let's say $100k income, single person. No pre tax
| deductions and you'll be bringing home $6200/mo. So over
| 50% of your take home goes to mortgage alone.
|
| In your example, your home prices were roughly 3x-4x your
| annual income. Compared to your example of prices being
| 5x.
| Retric wrote:
| Why on earth would a single person buy a 490k house?
| Everyone I know either had roommates, an inheritance, or
| make enough it's a trivial expense.
|
| Also don't forget about the home mortgage tax deduction,
| that plus inflation really impacts the cost of home
| ownership.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| Median household income in the US is $71k.
| art-not wrote:
| I live in Toronto. The lowest I've seen for a job listing
| at a tech-oriented small company was 90k on the low
| end(the job listing was 90k-120k), and this was for
| someone with 2 years experience. I've never seen a tech
| or tech-adjacent company offer 60k for even new grads.
| Most small companies I've seen offer for someone with 5+
| years of solid experience a minimum of 120k USD. These
| are for remote jobs.
| ta988 wrote:
| So you say a salary above the median salary is not
| enough? This raises a big question of how is half the
| population in the country getting by.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| I've been very confused about how people are getting by.
|
| If they're not in tech, and and they're not a member of
| the professional class (doctor, lawyer, etc), how are
| they doing it?
|
| Is everyone working two jobs and doing uber on top of
| that, or what? How much of a bubble am I in? I'm in tech
| and I feel like I'm barely making it.
| gtowey wrote:
| I wonder the same thing. I suspect that the answer is
| they carry a lot of debt that they never really expect to
| pay off.
| lacrimacida wrote:
| Middle class has been and continues to being squished and
| crushed, things are getting worse and worse if you
| haven't noticed. And it's not just in the US, but also
| other western economies such as Germany, France, UK, etc.
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| << Retire early >> is the main part you're missing from
| their argument, that implies saving large portions of
| disposable income. I always feel sad when people have
| high paying jobs they hate just so that << retire early
| >> though, in a field like software engineering you can
| find a happy medium I feel like.
| Fargren wrote:
| The happy medium for me would be working less than 20
| hours per week. It's not about the work but about how
| much time it consumes. And part time software engineering
| jobs don't seem to exist... I would happily live on half
| my income for half my hours. But if retiring early is
| more realistic than that (and it seems to be), I'll take
| it.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Roommates, living with parents. A decade+ past when
| earlier generations moved to their own homes.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Well, not being able to retire at 60-100k is such an US
| problem... It is enough to easily retirely at whatever
| the legal retirement age is, earlier if I include all tue
| benefits my boring big corp job and collectively
| bargained salary provide.
| Draiken wrote:
| You can always lower your standard of living, sure. But
| that's a different conversation IMO.
|
| I guess technically that's a choice, but it's so bad in the
| long term I personally can't consider it valid.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Living below your means (whatever that is) is a very good
| thing, not a bad thing.
|
| Being stuck on an expenses ~= income treadmill is what
| sucks.
| Draiken wrote:
| Living below your means is separated from your standard
| of living.
|
| In a better world everyone should be able to live well
| without having to sacrifice as much.
|
| Somehow we've convinced ourselves that it's always the
| individual's fault when they have to live with a worse
| standard of living to maybe retire one day.
| sokoloff wrote:
| It's the individual's _wise choice_ (not fault) when they
| do that, IMO.
| Draiken wrote:
| I agree with you regarding the means of living but that's
| not what I said.
|
| Accepting that you will have to work until you die is
| lowering your standard of living. So is accepting that
| any emergency can bankrupt you or that you will never be
| able to travel, and so on.
|
| For some reason people are conflating standards of living
| with irresponsible spending.
| neogodless wrote:
| Can you elaborate?
|
| As I've never raised my standard of living to spending
| over $100K / year, I don't exactly know what I'm missing.
|
| I think more to your point, yes there is a choice - to
| make $500K at a "big bad tech company" and then spend
| like there's no tomorrow on things that you feel are
| worth spending all that money on, hoping that it makes up
| for the 40 hours you spend working (and maybe hating?) Or
| you enjoy your 40 hour job, make less, spend less. But
| spending money doesn't have a direct and equal
| correlation with life satisfaction. I spend about $65K /
| year (for two people, no kids), and I feel like I have an
| amazing life, and spending a bunch more money would, at
| best, have small incremental returns on life
| satisfaction.
| Draiken wrote:
| Of course!
|
| I have also never raised my spending to anything close to
| that. Nor I have the choice of making $500k (I wish).
|
| When I mention standard of living I don't mean spending
| like crazy. I mean not having to constantly worry that if
| you lose your job you can't make your mortgage in a few
| months.
|
| I save around 50% of my salary and I'd save even more if
| I didn't have a kid and wasn't the sole provider in my
| home right now. Not because I wouldn't love to be living
| like a king, but because for me that's the only option I
| have to afford a life long term.
|
| What if I die? What if I get hurt and can't work anymore?
| What if me or my wife gets sick and we can't treat it
| with the limited free healthcare we have access to?
|
| Even barring that. I absolutely hate that I have to give
| away the prime hours of my day to ensure me and my family
| can simply survive. I don't want to do that forever. I'd
| much rather use all I know to build software that
| actually makes a difference. Read more, experience life
| more. Travel at least once in my life. Enjoy life while
| I'm not declining physically and mentally.
|
| I could definitely earn less and live a less stressful
| life in a better company if I wanted to. But that's the
| kind of decision that will most likely come back to haunt
| me and my family in the long term.
|
| Maybe I get very lucky and none of those things happen,
| and all the time I suffered through those soulless jobs
| was not needed. But in my view that's a risk I'm willing
| to take.
|
| To your point, if you are talking about simply getting
| all that extra money and spend it all without a care, I
| agree. That's a choice but one I don't have the same
| sympathy for.
| lolinder wrote:
| > I can't earn the same as you all can because I don't live
| in the US, but if I did I would grind all the leetcode (as
| insulting as I find them) for one single reason: I don't want
| to work forever.
|
| I work from home for a mid-sized company for <=40 hours a
| week. I turn off my computer at 5pm and don't think about
| work until 9am the next morning. I work with people I like
| and we get stuff done. And in spite of all that, we're hardly
| impoverished--my current forecast is I can retire 10 years
| early at this rate. Tech salaries are good everywhere in the
| US, they're just not as insane as they are in Silicon Valley.
|
| I could probably retire _even earlier_ if I were willing to
| enter the rat race, but I 'd rather be there for my kids'
| childhoods than resurface from the grind just in time to send
| them off to college.
|
| In other words, it's absolutely possible to choose to avoid
| it, and it doesn't even require much sacrifice.
| Loughla wrote:
| For context outside of tech. I have a super flexible job
| with amazing benefits. I haven't missed a single thing my
| kids have done, unless I chose to.
|
| And I'll work until I'm 75.
|
| I say this not out of being bitter, but for the context
| that many (probably most) people who do _what they love to
| do_ don 't get the massive paychecks even mid-tier tech
| jobs get. Context is everything.
| zorrotorro wrote:
| Bless you.
|
| Which is even more surprising on 'hacker' news. Maybe the
| average (US-centric) 'hacker' nowadays is just a corporate
| worker dreaming.
|
| I recently joined a megacorp after decades of small companies
| and I'm having quite enough fun on the project side and
| everything. Corporate bureaucracy is nothing after you dealt
| with actual international bureaucracy. Only downside is that
| pay is /too low/.
| harimau777 wrote:
| How do you go about finding a job at an amazing company with
| fulfilling jobs?
| skrebbel wrote:
| For starters, HN has a monthly "Who's hiring?" thread with a
| lot of cool companies posting. Personally I find a lot more
| of the posts there to make me go "hey that sounds like a cool
| place to work" than eg a search on job sites or Stack
| Overflow career ads. In a broad sense I mean, eg there's tiny
| startups, healthy profitable SMBs, and VC-fueled unicorn
| rocket ships posting there, but they all seem above-average
| cool for their category to me.
|
| As an employer, I find that the inverse holds too -
| applicants that find us via the "Who's hiring?" thread are
| much more often a potential fit than those who find us via
| other routes.
| layer8 wrote:
| Look for owner-managed companies without middle management,
| or where middle management consists of engineers and not
| MBAs. Look for small(ish) companies that work on topics you
| find interesting. Connect with people who are looking for the
| same. You might not find the fulfilling job in a sane company
| on the first try, but if you keep looking and talking to
| people, you're likely to find one.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "It seems to me that there's a class of programmer that will
| take an overpaid job at a terrible BigCo, spend their evenings
| writing ranty blog posts about how terrible it all is,
| culminating in the inevitable "I quit" article, only
| subsequently to accept a job at a different terrible BigCo."
|
| I don't know, it sounds like you think people actually like
| their jobs. Seems like for most of us, we do work at shitty
| BigCos. Plenty of small shitty companies too. That's just how
| life goes.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Agreed. It takes constant effort and a lot of luck to land at
| a small company with competent people and good, sane culture.
|
| I scored that once by accident. We all keep in touch, people
| from every department, and recount how it was the best job we
| ever had.
|
| It was acquired by a medium company of limited competence and
| everyone was scattered to the wind in a frenzy of empire
| building by the managers in that company.
|
| I have been consulting/contracting and visiting megacorps
| since then. Traumatizing, to say the least.
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| I have no idea who Zippia is, but according to them 1/3rd of
| software engineers in the US work at companies >10,000 people.
| And 2/3rds of software engineers work at companies still >
| 1,000 people.
|
| So I'd argue, working at a small shop, while not rare, also
| isn't as predominant as you're portraying.
|
| https://www.zippia.com/software-engineer-jobs/demographics/
| skrebbel wrote:
| While I meant globally, and I'm not sure that these stats
| generalize beyond the US (but they very much might), I'm
| surprised! I had expected 2/3rd to work at companies under
| 1000 employees simply because there's so extremely many of
| those and many of them need devs.
|
| EDIT woa that page says there's 320k software engineers in
| the US. That's one entire percent of the population! That's a
| lot, could that really be true?
| eliasdaler wrote:
| That's 0.1%, actually.
| mutex_man wrote:
| Every time I see these articles I'm amazed at how at odds it is
| with my experience. I work for a tiny company of ~30 people and
| it's awesome. I'm super well taken care of in pay, benefits,
| and work/life balance. I could make a bit more at a large corp,
| but I get some pretty stellar benefits here. Also if it's
| anything like what I read on here then there's no way it's
| worth it.
| hn_version_0023 wrote:
| Sounds like "hustle culture", which IMO is a cancer on the
| human mind.
|
| We're apex predators; laziness is inherent to our being. Or at
| least thats my head-canon :)
| gcapu wrote:
| God points but:
|
| 1) For someone in BigCo it is fun to read.
|
| 2) BigCo is not a bad place for most people. Management should
| just shut up about efficiency and data driven. No one believes
| them, not even themselves.
| starky wrote:
| Yeah, at this point in my career I'm tired of the bullshit
| that management spouts. I know they don't believe one bit of
| what they are saying except as a method to get product out
| quicker. We aren't even necessarily labour bound, but
| management doesn't accept that 9 women can't make a baby in a
| month.
|
| I'm all for looking at processes periodically to make sure we
| are doing the right things to get everything released, but
| when you come at it from a hitting ever tighter arbitrary
| KPIs you just make everyone angry or apathetic to your words.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| The audience for the management statements, such as investors
| and analysts, might just want to hear certain things. These
| things will have certain fads and fashions as to what needs
| to be uttered.
| Moru wrote:
| It's also nice to read for us in SmallCo. We remember why we
| took that salary hit to stay sane.
| charlie0 wrote:
| Hey, some of us in SmallCo have dreams of trading in joy
| for a much larger paycheck at BigCo. No pain, no gain.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _But there's this super prevalent idea that keeps getting
| pumped around the blogosphere that it's absolutely impossible
| to not work at a terrible huge company and therefore you cannot
| possibly escape, and I quote, "going home and despairing"._
|
| Behind all such writing is an unspoken piece of context: those
| terrible huge companies pay software devs better than small
| ones. It's not that they _can 't_ work at a smaller company -
| it's just that it means taking a hit to your take-home pay, so
| it's Not An Option.
| antupis wrote:
| Also work life balance is usually better in big corp you
| actually can clock that 9:5 and go home.
| djbusby wrote:
| All of my friends at FB/G work way more hours than me and
| miss family activities. Same as when I was at MS.
| surajrmal wrote:
| The people who tend to work extra hours are the ones who
| choose to in my experience. If you don't work extra hours
| now you won't after switching to one of those companies
| either. You might witness folks who do, but you can
| usually tell they are more self motivated than they are
| forced into it.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| FAANG are megacorps pretending to be startups to young
| developers, and treat them accordingly. There are other
| megacorps doing tech that behave like proper megacorps,
| and pay accordingly.
| BoxFour wrote:
| Those companies tend to attract type As, and it's
| similarly easy for non type As to feel implicit peer
| pressure. You don't have to work a ton to succeed.
|
| If you prefer to maintain a 9-5 schedule at these
| companies, it's extremely possible as long as you:
|
| 1) genuinely stick to a 9-5 work routine (some
| individuals I saw struggling were actually working
| something like 11-4).
|
| 2) are comfortable with the possibility of not
| experiencing rapid career advancement, potentially
| reaching a plateau at the first terminal level.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Depends on the company. My stints with BigCorp life were
| full of 6-7PM meeting times and expectations to keep up
| with Slack and email even during vacations and holidays.
|
| I have friends at Amazon who have started to miss our
| Saturday events because they're feverishly working to avoid
| being caught in the next round of layoffs.
|
| I also have friends at some FAANG companies who seem like
| they're barely working (their own admission) so it varies
| wildly. Can't really generalize.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Bezos is a known taskmaster.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Unless you're talking about big tech that's not true. A
| random bank or insurance company or whatever will pay worse
| than well funded startups
| neogodless wrote:
| You're saying if you can't maximize your pay, it's _not an
| option_?
|
| I cannot wrap my head around it. Being happy with your life
| is not a one-to-one correlation with income. You can _make
| less money_ than "maximum" and still have a great life.
| argiopetech wrote:
| It's not necessarily maximizing money, but maintaining
| lifestyle. It's extremely common for people to increase
| their standard of living as their means increase, and
| reducing that requires significant effort in some cases
| (e.g., people tend to buy as much house as they can afford,
| so any significant salary reduction could necessitate
| selling the house and uprooting your family). It's a
| minimal sacrifice in the face of having to work a job you
| hate, IMO, but it's still a powerful barrier for many.
| neogodless wrote:
| Right.
|
| > extremely common for people to increase their standard
| of living
|
| That was a choice. But the opposite is "not a choice"?
| You choose to spend so much money that you are forced
| into work you may despise to support the spending choices
| you make, so there's no option to... not make those
| spending choices?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Choices aren't made equal. Some are easier to make, even
| unconsciously, than others. For example, choosing
| immediate pleasure is easier than immediate discomfort. A
| series of small, incremental choices over time is easier
| than one large step. Etc.
| djoletina wrote:
| What is your point? It's still a choice. It's easier to
| spend more money than less money, great insight.
| argiopetech wrote:
| It's also easier to spend the same money than to spend
| less money. Given two easy things, most people won't
| chose the hard thing most of the time.
| argiopetech wrote:
| I'm unsure why you've quoted "not a choice", as I never
| said any such thing. I said it's difficult for many to
| decide to change their lifestyle to afford a less
| lucrative but more enjoyable job.
|
| You've also got the cause and effect backward. You do the
| work you can be employed to do with the promise of (in
| your opinion, and relative to your skill and
| responsibility) competitive compensation. Years go by,
| you get used to living with that salary (plus yearly
| raises), and then you realize your job sucks. Now what do
| you do? Soldier on at BigCo1, switch companies to an
| effectively isomorphic position at BigCo2, or spend low 5
| figures moving to and outfitting a new house for a 20%
| pay cut and a job you love? All three are choices, but #3
| has the highest barrier to decision.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > I'm unsure why you've quoted "not a choice", as I never
| said any such thing.
|
| TeMPORaL did, though, in the parent chain. That's why
| neogodless is quoting it. (This isn't a one-on-one
| conversation here...)
| skrebbel wrote:
| Agree! In fact, while you wrote this I made an edit (last
| sentence) to address that. It was supposed to be my core
| point but I had somehow left it implicit.
| archiewood wrote:
| > This is because Power BI tracks usage metrics and almost all
| dashboards are completely unused.
|
| This is what I term the "dirty secret of BI" - for most
| organisations, most dashboards are unused, except by the teams
| creating them.
|
| This is because reports need to be useful to be used, and most
| are not. In my opinion useful means one of:
|
| 1) Aiding people with actual decision making power to make
| decisions
|
| 2) Improving the ability of "front line" staff to complete
| their day to day tasks better
|
| PowerBI and similar tools are poorly suited to the above
| because 1) requires mgmt to understand the data they are
| looking at, which is difficult without context in a grid of
| charts, and 2) requires a thoughtfully designed, fast UX that
| is basically impossible to deliver in a dashboard.
|
| I'm now working on an open source BI tool, Evidence.dev
| (https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence) which is targeted at
| these two use cases. It enables you to add context to data
| inline, design the UX for the use case, and is just fast.
|
| Previous discussions on HN:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35645464 (97 comments)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28304781 (91 comments)
| cxr wrote:
| This has nothing to do with the comment you replied to. Even
| the quote at the top of your comment is a quote from the
| article, and not from the parent.
| skrebbel wrote:
| Looks like a pretty cool tool though!
| throaway234 wrote:
| I'm with you here. I don't like this hand-wringing suffer porn
| (great label btw!) about how something is wrong with the world.
|
| We only have to consider that building and maintaining an
| organization is not a clear science. To think otherwise is to
| indulge in utopian thinking. So there will always be wasted
| effort in any organization, whether it's BigCo or SmallCo or
| Boy Scouts or the local Church. It's like, if you build any
| machine, that machine will produce waste. Heck, if you
| undertake any venture, such as cooking a meal or writing a book
| or running a 5k, you will produce waste: wasted food scraps,
| wasted words (that the editor will remove), wasted trainings
| (when you werent really focused, eg.)
|
| A person being unhappy about an organization happens because of
| a single reason: they are placed in a position in that
| organization that makes them unhappy. They can change their
| position or the organization. Or they can recalibrate their
| mind to make themselves happy.
|
| And this is what happens: people move around or change jobs or
| reflect and discover a new purpose.
| mouzogu wrote:
| > "Reward people for staying, and I'll know you're serious about
| valuing people."
|
| this resonates.
|
| what i noticed is that managers often hire people that won't
| outshine them.
|
| so, soon you end up with a team of idiots being managed by an
| even bigger idiot.
|
| it's just all so tiresome. in the end quiet-quitting or work-to-
| rule is the only logical result, especially in a bad job market
| where your options are limited.
| anvil-on-my-toe wrote:
| Why do modern organizations suck?
|
| 1) Power corrupts - individuals who acquire power don't concern
| themselves with the well-being of others. They are blinded by
| greed.
|
| 2)The bureaucratic trap - the idea you can just think really hard
| and anticipate what all the problems will be and then write
| rules. It always fails.
|
| People need agency. A smart, careful, considering person or
| community thinks about the actual situation and how to deal with
| it in some way. Top down thinking and the belief that you can
| predict everything and subject it to a process, is flawed.
| pmontra wrote:
| I'm sure that the author understands the difference between a
| clearcut fencing competition and the messy competition between
| companies and between the very people inside those companies. Yet
| there is little or nothing about that in the article.
|
| Those Dereks can survive inside companies because the
| contribution of every single person is so tiny that it's very
| difficult to measure. Furthermore, most of the times it doesn't
| influence the success or failure of ambitious managers.
|
| Those Dereks know it, maybe got their fingers burned attempting
| to be smart in the past, they do only what's needed to get their
| money on their bank account at the end of the month.
|
| Move some of them in a position where their work makes the
| difference between losing and winning (software for a racing car
| team?) and they might undull themselves.
| _rm wrote:
| This is feelgood venting, but without addressing the root of the
| problem.
|
| All these managers are paid to do this BS. By the company. And
| that company is owned by people, who ultimately have the final
| say how it will be run, and who are paying the price.
|
| There needs to be a lot more discussion around corporate
| governance with regards to this topic. I.e. how is it allowed to
| happen.
|
| Why aren't companies adequently training and selecting managers,
| when it's the biggest effector of their performance vs their
| competitors? To the extent that dysfunctional management is
| nearly ubiquitous?
|
| Why do we frequently hear stories like Icahn goes and fires a
| floor of staff with no effect on operations?
|
| Because it sounds like a huge opportunity in the M&A space.
| Perhaps new tech can be developed to detect companies like these,
| to target them for acquisition and then purge them of BS.
| scaramanga wrote:
| It reminds me of every layoff ever. It's a remarkable feature
| of layoffs that the people organizing them never have to lay
| themselves off. Think of the awkward conversations they would
| have had to have with their family...
|
| "Honey, I did a cost/benefit analysis and found that my role
| was parasitic value extraction. To maximise the goals of the
| organisation I have decided to make myself redundant. Further I
| have decided to give myself 0 days of notice and 0 compensation
| so that the organisation can use that money to further it's
| important goals. I'm afraid Christmas is cancelled this year.
| However, think of the shareholder value I have created."
|
| The mistake OP makes is to assume that the objective of the
| business is to be a an efficient and productive enterprise.
|
| But that ignores the fact that the business is composed of
| individuals drawn of the population of human beings who have
| more prosaic biological needs. From the perspective of
| management, the enterprise is simply a thing that exists for
| the purpose of letting them be in charge of it.
|
| This explains several other "paradoxes" such as why wages are
| low, or why the social security safety net isn't great. Happy,
| healthy, productive workers, who can speak their minds freely
| when it comes to problems, even problems created by their
| superiors, might lead to more efficiency and higher profits.
| But they also rob management of their social position and the
| daily experience of being surrounded by people who hold them in
| very high regard, and treat them with respect and deference. We
| don't need to do a randomized controlled trial to figure out
| which of these two alternate universes we're currently residing
| in.
|
| That is why any political treaty or consensus between
| management and workers, such as the new-deal or post-war
| consensus, will eventually be attacked and destroyed by the
| managers and owners even if it tanks the entire economy with
| it. The last 40 (and especially the last 10-15) years of
| US/european history and the destruction of the post-war
| consensus appears to have borne this theory out.
| _rm wrote:
| The point of takeover layoffs is that problem you describe in
| the first paragraph is nullified.
|
| A well publicised example was the recent takeover of Musk of
| Twitter. He started by firing everyone at the top first,
| before moving on to cutting general staff second.
|
| That's usually exactly the way to fix this problem, because
| BS-ing middle management requires apathetic upper management
| who're only concerned with milking their positions as long as
| they can (requiring no-one upset the apple cart). That in
| turn requires owners who are too dispersed, distant, or
| incompetent to band together and root out such parasites from
| the top down.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > Why aren't companies adequently training and selecting
| managers
|
| We've _never_ trained managers. My father used to complain
| about this. He was an army officer before he went into
| industry; army officers are trained to manage.
|
| I guess the difference with industry is that a trained manager
| can switch jobs; a trained army officer has a choice of exactly
| one employer. So training an officer is a long-term investment
| for the army, but training a manager just gives him an
| incentive to jump ship.
| prometheon1 wrote:
| Is the article not valuable without address the root of the
| problem?
|
| The author explains how he copes with the way organisations
| behave. Without this coping mechanism, he would be less happy
| and more angry. This coping mechanism could help a lot of
| unhappy/angry people right now, while solving the root problem
| requires more time and collaboration. Maybe it is also okay if
| we make people more happy right now, and work on the root
| problem in the next article?
| _rm wrote:
| Maybe but I feel the philosophy of this article is the same
| as that which the "checked out" employee I've frequently met
| in my career has swallowed.
|
| They aren't happy people, because they've kind of given up
| and become cynical at life as a whole.
|
| The article would've been more helpful if it had, say,
| encouraged people to start their own businesses and do
| better.
| abraae wrote:
| > Why aren't companies adequently training and selecting
| managers, when it's the biggest effector of their performance
| vs their competitors? To the extent that dysfunctional
| management is nearly ubiquitous?
|
| That's how the world used to work, back in the 90s and before.
|
| It doesn't work today, since job mobility is so high. What's
| the point in training up someone, just for them to jump ship to
| a competitor for a healthy pay raise?
| _rm wrote:
| A skilled acquirer would've interviewed engineering before
| moving forward, ostensibly on the grounds of "knowing what
| they're buying". They'd then know who to give bonuses and
| promotions to, vs those to kick out, from day one.
| jpc0 wrote:
| Yep, also pension plans going away and the fact those same
| employees can even get that substantial pay raise isn't the
| problem at all.
|
| Pay employees well, give them a dream to catch and make sure
| they won't die miserable and would you believe they may just
| decide to stick around.
| zubairq wrote:
| Brilliant post. Yes, I agree with 99% of it. I do however think
| you should start your own business and be your own boss, to see
| if you can be any better. I used to complain about management all
| the time, and then I became management, and i was even WORSE than
| they had been! (But I was able to recognise that I was worse)
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| >>"Most managers have never had an independent thought on how to
| manage people effectively (hence the Agile parroting),
|
| >>> most programmers don't know what an abstraction is, etc, etc.
| "
|
| So many programmers think they are the next Dijkstra and are
| upset with LLM's producing crap code, but really over inflate
| themselves in their own reflection and forget that it is better
| than 90% of programmers.
|
| Remember in collage, when 1 guy did the group project and the 3
| other people on the team coasted and got the A. Well 75% of who
| you are working with now, are the ones that didn't finish the
| project, and likely you are one of them.
|
| That's why LLM's are going to cause sweeping changes.
| bryananderson wrote:
| There's some worthwhile stuff here about how perverse incentives
| lead to pathological outcomes in large organizations, but...
|
| > Here's the pressure if you're in the 10% of people that aren't
| crud at their jobs - you're surrounded by people that are crud.
|
| > In professional settings, approximately all of my time goes
| into solving problems introduced by people that are just
| indescribably bad.
|
| Jesus. If this is really the case, consider that your
| organization might be abnormally bad and that you should leave.
|
| I've worked with a few incompetent engineers, but never have I
| ever worked somewhere where 90% of ICs are so bad that they're
| actively making the product worse and burning all of the other
| 10%'s time on trying to undo the 90%'s work. Of course it's also
| not true when an organization claims that everyone there is a
| "10x ninja rockstar". Most people I've worked with are smart but
| human. If I worked somewhere where 90% of my peer engineers were
| as bad as OP's are, I'd leave ASAP by any means necessary.
|
| The alternate hypothesis, of course, is that I'm part of the 90%
| but don't know it!
| Drakim wrote:
| The thing is, there isn't one singular measure of value in
| terms of how the product can be "bad" or "good". I've very
| often seen less experienced engineers make stuff that helps a
| specific customer (good), but makes the app just a little less
| organized and understandable in the long run (bad). I often
| have to step in and fix the damage done that might not be
| visible at first glance for a lot of my coworkers. I wouldn't
| say it's 90%, but maybe 60%.
|
| The thing is, it's not like said engineer didn't actually
| deliver a useful thing to a customer, so it's not like he did
| objectively universally bad. But they might not realize that if
| everybody worked like this, a few years down the line, our
| entire product would be beyond saving.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > but makes the app just a little less organized and
| understandable in the long run (bad)
|
| This sounds like normal code-rot; code is changed to achieve
| some particular goal, but budget isn't allocated for the
| requisite refactoring. I personally prefer that refactoring
| opportunities are seized whenever they appear; managers with
| budgets don't usually agree, for understandable reasons.
| Eventually you end up with a hairball that can't be
| refactored, and has to be rewritten.
|
| Whether a change should be made at all, whether to go ahead
| and refactor there and then, or how long to postpone the
| refactoring, are all business decisions that have to be taken
| by the person that manages the budget.
| lapestenoire wrote:
| Unreadable. Organize your thoughts, write concisely. You believe
| you have something to say; we would love to hear it. But we
| aren't willing to wade through a sewage of words.
| meesterdude wrote:
| we would love to see you cite some examples
| jsocuwl wrote:
| Don't hide behind "we", stand for yourself. I found this
| article very readable and I heard what the author had to say.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| On the contrary, I liked this post quite a lot, and enjoyed the
| way that it was written.
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