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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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%.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To be clear, I mean that when you apply for jobs, try to convey these trusted people in your life as much as you can about the role - conversations you've had, things you saw on a site visit, public info about the company, and ask whether they see any red flags, esp. as relate to your incompatibilities. Not that you use them as actual connections to find a job.
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.
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%.
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.
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.
Just start right away. But first you need to understand where you are and what will bring the most value for your effort. Start with the immediate issues.
For example, is there some process improvement such as getting more data, new monitoring tool or logging solution that would reduce time spent in firefighting? Something that would immediately help you solve the next issue more easily? Do it while working the issue.
Can you rewrite the tickets so they are no longer poorly planned, making them easier and quicker to implement? Do it while working on one ticket. Depending on the organization, you can probably rewrite the tickets even if it is not your job, but that may cause waves. If that is too risky, another alternative is to create sub-tasks for the high-level issue that are better planned. If you need another high-level ticket, just ask for it.
When work is not optimal due to time pressure, there are probably costs related with that. Saving time and resources requires longer-term perspective and making some investment. But often there are things that require only smallish investment, and that is what you can very likely do.
When you save time for your company, re-invest that time into some other improvements that bring bigger results but might require a little bit more effort.
The lesson is that you have more flexibility than you realize, because your manager probably does not understand what you are doing. If you get good results, you may be eventually granted more flexibility. But that will most likely take time if you are working in an environment that is constantly fighting fires.
Yes, this is important. Most people seem to self-sabotage their power. But many managers at least profess to look for "self-guided" people.
I do this so regularly it is kind of a second nature to me. Sometimes is backfires, but if you really know what you are doing, mostly you will be fine. Might even get rewarded or promoted.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This actually corresponds to another thing I've only recently admitted to myself, namely that I put a lot more pressure on my job for meaning and satisfaction because I'm compensating for perceived deficits in other areas of my life, like not having a spouse or children, even though those are important to me (not just a societal pressure).
I do have friends and activities that are important to me, but nothing within an order of magnitude the time devoted to my job.
If I had another important full-time role that applied whether or not I was working, I think I would have an easier time seeing my job as a means to that end, and I have a lot of respect for people whose lives are ordered that way.
Years ago, when I was doing academic research, I was working for more than 60 hours a week, often on weekends. On the whole it was enjoyable, but then I realized that I was spending an enormous amount of time writing papers that ten people, if I was lucky, would cite, for a far-from-guaranteed professional future in academia, setting aside my romantic and social life because, in the end, overcoming the inertia there seemed more challenging and tiresome than simply occupying my time trying to develop a fairly useless but potentially-perceived-as-novel algorithm.
Then, gradually at first, and then suddenly, my life made a critical and abrupt transition, and now my professional life has to fit into my life full of interests, occasional romance, family, sports, and all the other things that can make life more interesting.
> 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.
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.
The choice is not between licking the boots of your boss or instead doing meaningful work; it is not between earning a lot of money and doing boring work or instead earning not as much and doing entertaining work; not between eating like a pig or maniacally counting calories and macros.
Most of the time, the choice is between not saying something to your team or boss that will probably not be in your favor when you submit your promo package, or being one of those heroes who metaphorically dies in a battle that no one actually cares about.
It is between skipping the pack of Oreos for today in favor of some chicken and rice, not between being full or starving.
>It is not hard to guess where I spend most of my efforts and thinking.
Hope it's in a savings buffer. Everyone should have "fuck you" money[1] for this exact reason, but the next best thing is 3-6 months in immediate savings for rainy days. coporate shutting you down shouldn't be the immediate end of the world, especially not at the salaries tech is paid at.
Yes, I have plenty of savings. But in any case, having a lot of savings does not make me lean toward starting crusades at work to use Julia instead of Python or a random forest instead of a neural network. When you see the corporate world for what it is, there is no turning back.
I am a professional well aware that I am the most important person in my life and a cog in the machine when I have my badge around my neck or on my belt like the gunslingers once carried their Colts.
Sure. It's more to protect you against when work wants to cut your pay, force you back into office, or you simply fall into office politics by someone climbing the corporate ladder. 6 months savings isn't "fuck you" money, and I'm guessing me and you both wouldn't be working for BigCo if. We had that money.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
Long ago I worked in places where the CEO did exactly that. "Management by walking around" (it even had the abbreviation MBWA) has fallen out of favor, though. People just don't walk any more.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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).
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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'd expect anarchists to support a business? Not left-anarchists, and I don't think I've ever met a "centrist anarchist". Ancaps maybe, but they're kind of bad for other obvious reasons.
Anyway, it is not, their answer is literally to shrug and say "people will do it".
Either way, nobody has realized that supply chains exist. When they say "people", they don't mean businesses, because they don't believe in management or capital assets.
> 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.
But that makes it even worse that their murder rate was so much worse than the rest of the country!
Of course, that's not the usual problem with an anarchist collective. The usual problem is what happens when the more charismatic members sexually assault the less charismatic members. (Hint: they get ejected for trying to go to the police and it gets covered up.)
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
>> 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.
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)!"?
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.
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.
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-...
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The modern system favors executives as opposed to owners. The executive class has figured out how to extract a significant chuck from to owners share for their own coffers.
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
What you say is true but doesn't help the working programmers, sadly.
I have once exclaimed to one team lead / project lead during a call with 20+ other programmers: "Why are we even talking to you if you can't make any difference? I want to talk to somebody who will understand our problems and try to help".
Longest awkward silence ever. Needless to say, I left shortly after.
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.
Agreed. Author is a pretentious moron, and it's people like him that ruin companies for everyone else. Absolutely toxic. I just wish he'd keep these opinions to himself instead of spreading them around the internet, lowering our collective IQs.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
> It does not, that I could tell, actually say the metrics work has revealed data the company is ignoring.
I guess I wasn’t clear: The metrics work isn’t _revealing_ anything new, the data requested is what is produced. The fact that the data is _ignored_ means that it can have serious errors, but then nobody seems worried about correcting it except for our frustrated conscientious developer because producing the reports is a performative act. Nobody really uses the data for anything.
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.
Author here once again. I have the worst possible answer for this - most data teams that I've seen (and my network is large enough through my own socialising + my blog to be reasonably confident on this) are working on dashboards that could not conceivably be acted upon. As in, the nature of the thing they are reporting on is not susceptible to top-down intervention.
You are however totally correct that some places will have actually valid use cases for this kind of reporting. The article is very much not for those people, as they don't have these kinds of concerns for the most part. This is for people that are watching their organization talk about behaving one way, then acting in a totally different way.
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.
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".)
>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.
I love game reviews and they give me very different lenses on how to view video games. Even the ones that absolutely hate a game.
I have yet to really find a useful anime reviewer. There are a few videos from a few youtubers that offer some interesting insight, but seasonal anime reviewers are either poor writers/critics or are simply trying to appeal to an audience who wants to hear their opinions regurgitated. So they focus less on insightful interesting anime and more on hating [current anime trend].
>the previous trend was "incest romance"
it's still around in manga/light novels. I think the "issue" is that these days most anime use it as a small trope instead of the entire premise. Heck, even in most of the infamous examples the element wasnt omnipresent.
- 75% of OreImo is not focused at all about the romance of the siblings. In fact, the male lead dates someone else entirely in the 2nd season.
- Kiss X Sis opens up to a more general harem in the middle of the anime and that MC dates the teacher for a while (SPOILERS I guess, for anime only. But that anime is a decade+ out and the manga ended 2 years ago. You're not getting that arc animated).
- Domestic girlfriend is the most recent and probably tamest example. Yes, I guess it's technically incest to date your new 17YO stepsister that you had sex with before you even knew your parents were getting married. We're well past Westermarck effect though.
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?
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 £33400), for 8000 employees that's £267m 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.
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?
Firstly, I absolutely agree, the argument you're responding to gave me pause for a moment, then I realized it's probably nonsense in most cases and it also isn't disagreeing with me at all.
If the thing I am working on doesn't matter because it's a rounding error to the organization, but they keep telling me that it does matter and we should be driving for perfection, bla bla bla, then the original poster is agreeing with me, I think. I'm not arguing about whether it makes sense for the organization, I'm making an argument against believing the organization.
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.
> "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.
I once worked at a place where management kept going on and on about reducing toil, but wouldn't let us use something to automate a bunch of extremely manual workloads.
It eventually occurred to me that we didn't have to, because the team was the mechanism for automating those workloads. They couldn't tell us they weren't that important, so the easiest option was to just talk about automation while paying us a bunch to keep troubleshooting the gross scripts.
Again - that is totally fine, as long as you know what's going on. Then you can make a clear decision around whether you want to stay.
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".
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?”
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.
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.
A few people really fixated on "bad", even though I'd never endorse calling a non-fictional person bad right to their face, if only because I don't think work is a good reason to make anyone feel bad (unless they're interfering with something important like lifesaving work and it's necessary).
But yes, intentions are unrelated to outcomes. There are many things that I do not do professionally because I don't want to make people's lives worse or do a bad job. That said, I'm sympathetic because the world is crazy and I'm sure these people have families to feed. Just, you know, don't get invested in them improving if they don't seem like they want to.
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.
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.
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.
> …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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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].
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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!
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
There's only so much one person can do for 'awareness'. At my workplace new projects usually trickle down from leadership, thru management, and eventually to the engineers. Leadership, in an effort to meet some OKR to be 'more data driven', had the engineers make an intake process for new work. After months of email blasts 'Please submit new project requests thru the form' across the org the grand total of project requests received was one (1). Even the leadership that demanded this process be implemented didn't use it.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I suspect the organization gets too big, and the communication overhead + politics takes over everything else. That is, I think it is theoretically not possible at a large organization, except in very rare circumstances where you've lucked into the right people and incentive structure. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If it's a government agency, or some other organization where it's possible that they're genuinely stunningly incompetent, I usually ask to see a Git repository. It's shocking how many places either literally don't version control code (including me, on my first team out of university) or can't even handle their branching strategy.
I usually ask a few questions about their management philosophy. A lot of people just immediately say crazy stuff around work hours and Agile.
I'll ask to look at their Jira backlog, or whatever they use. If they've got hundreds of cards in there, something has gone wrong (though this is not a dealbreaker by any means).
But for real, if they can keep a clean repository, that's so highly correlated with general competence that I can basically stop asking questions there. It's also nice because it isn't an aggressive question and you don't have to reveal what you're actually looking for.
And finally, I only interview at places through my network these days. Isn't worth the risk of running into a psychopath manager and having them ruins months of my life.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you want "passion" look no farther than the game industry. that "passion" lets them pay workers less and work more, despite being overall more engaged and working across multiple disciplines to ship a product.
And even despite all that engagement, the "passion" doesn't make you save you from layoffs. Even Epic in all its billions made from Fortnite money decided it didn't care. Nothing is sacred. I don't personally mind some inefficiences and the occasional incompetence (though, in games there's rarely IME intentional incompetence. Of course a designer won't understand performance impacts on a game, and a programmer won't necessarily have the best UX for artist tools in a first pass). But companies some 20 years ago at least pretended to have loyalty and reward tenure and that's all but gone now. Why put your heart into something that you know will break it 2-3 years down the line? or 18[1]?
I found the ability for experienced colleagues to achieve the "clock in clock out" mentality so relieving, liberating. It tells me that A) their life doesn't revolve around work, and B) they have the emotional fortitude to mentally flip the "I dont give a shit" switch on/off in their brain when necessary. That's a sign of maturity and of someone who can successfully adapt, to me.
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.
481 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 324 ms ] threadAn 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
"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.
Making a difference can only happen in small tight-knit teams.
At one point people started asking why I have 3 contracts in a single year.
Checkmate.
What would you do?
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.
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.
But yeah, I've done it.
For example, is there some process improvement such as getting more data, new monitoring tool or logging solution that would reduce time spent in firefighting? Something that would immediately help you solve the next issue more easily? Do it while working the issue.
Can you rewrite the tickets so they are no longer poorly planned, making them easier and quicker to implement? Do it while working on one ticket. Depending on the organization, you can probably rewrite the tickets even if it is not your job, but that may cause waves. If that is too risky, another alternative is to create sub-tasks for the high-level issue that are better planned. If you need another high-level ticket, just ask for it.
When work is not optimal due to time pressure, there are probably costs related with that. Saving time and resources requires longer-term perspective and making some investment. But often there are things that require only smallish investment, and that is what you can very likely do.
When you save time for your company, re-invest that time into some other improvements that bring bigger results but might require a little bit more effort.
The lesson is that you have more flexibility than you realize, because your manager probably does not understand what you are doing. If you get good results, you may be eventually granted more flexibility. But that will most likely take time if you are working in an environment that is constantly fighting fires.
I do this so regularly it is kind of a second nature to me. Sometimes is backfires, but if you really know what you are doing, mostly you will be fine. Might even get rewarded or promoted.
A few months later he quit.
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.
> 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.
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.
Having several copies of a GIT repo for different branches is a viable strategy as long as one does not do force-pushes.
In any case, I've made a speedy replacement.
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.
[0] https://git-scm.com/docs/git-worktree
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.
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.
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.
and anyway git-worktree is basically this workflow wrapped in nicer UX
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...
Truth is, everyone just wants to clock out and go home. CEOs included.
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.
You score a bonus pizza pie!
That's amore...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But I see my work as a means to other ends, and I am fine with my current situation.
I do have friends and activities that are important to me, but nothing within an order of magnitude the time devoted to my job.
If I had another important full-time role that applied whether or not I was working, I think I would have an easier time seeing my job as a means to that end, and I have a lot of respect for people whose lives are ordered that way.
Then, gradually at first, and then suddenly, my life made a critical and abrupt transition, and now my professional life has to fit into my life full of interests, occasional romance, family, sports, and all the other things that can make life more interesting.
And I make very good money.
Yeah, I did that for a long time before I understood I was doing the same.
That's how the employers get you. :(
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.
Today, I see my competence as a tool that has allowed me to be in the position I am in, which is enough.
Thinking about how I look to my boss is not work that I enjoy.
The choice is not between licking the boots of your boss or instead doing meaningful work; it is not between earning a lot of money and doing boring work or instead earning not as much and doing entertaining work; not between eating like a pig or maniacally counting calories and macros.
Most of the time, the choice is between not saying something to your team or boss that will probably not be in your favor when you submit your promo package, or being one of those heroes who metaphorically dies in a battle that no one actually cares about.
It is between skipping the pack of Oreos for today in favor of some chicken and rice, not between being full or starving.
Hope it's in a savings buffer. Everyone should have "fuck you" money[1] for this exact reason, but the next best thing is 3-6 months in immediate savings for rainy days. coporate shutting you down shouldn't be the immediate end of the world, especially not at the salaries tech is paid at.
[1] https://www.steveglaveski.com/blog/you-dont-need-f-ck-you-mo...
I am a professional well aware that I am the most important person in my life and a cog in the machine when I have my badge around my neck or on my belt like the gunslingers once carried their Colts.
I think you vastly overestimate the impact you can have on your career at a company of that size.
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.
Which one will kill you if you get it wrong?
Which one does the manufacturer think is important?
Why are those never the same?
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?
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.
This was about 1000 people.
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.
My comment from much above, to which many people replied, was from the point of view of a working programmer.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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).
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/government/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...
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).
As a concrete example, Mondragon has been operating very successfully for ~70 years, but barely anyone from outside the region registers its existence.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> look at other people's work and conclude that it's useless just because you don't personally watch them all day.
(Not you personally I mean.)
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.
There are definitely bullshit jobs, and jobs that are mostly bullshit.
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.
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.
You'd expect anarchists to support a business? Not left-anarchists, and I don't think I've ever met a "centrist anarchist". Ancaps maybe, but they're kind of bad for other obvious reasons.
Anyway, it is not, their answer is literally to shrug and say "people will do it".
https://twitter.com/doikaytnik/status/1680004065366011904
Sometimes they say "people will network" or "we'll rob a CVS".
https://twitter.com/RndmStreetMedic/status/16801584027673804...
Either way, nobody has realized that supply chains exist. When they say "people", they don't mean businesses, because they don't believe in management or capital assets.
> 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.
But that makes it even worse that their murder rate was so much worse than the rest of the country!
Of course, that's not the usual problem with an anarchist collective. The usual problem is what happens when the more charismatic members sexually assault the less charismatic members. (Hint: they get ejected for trying to go to the police and it gets covered up.)
https://libcom.org/article/silent-no-longer-confronting-sexu...
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.
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
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.
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.
Not saying that hasn't served us well for a long time, but I think there are improvements we could make in our society.
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... )
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)!"?
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.
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.)
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.
> 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.
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.
The theory is wrong, basically, if that's what it says.
Granted bad deals get made from time to time.
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.
> 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).
See: AT&T
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_prob...
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.
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.
Are you aware of that or you just came up with the same basic idea (a resource-based economy)?
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...
I mostly hate the game, and only part of the players.
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.
And, btw., things like delayering are fairly typical efficiency drives. So these "management" positions might not be that stable to start with.
I have once exclaimed to one team lead / project lead during a call with 20+ other programmers: "Why are we even talking to you if you can't make any difference? I want to talk to somebody who will understand our problems and try to help".
Longest awkward silence ever. Needless to say, I left shortly after.
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.
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.)
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?
I guess I wasn’t clear: The metrics work isn’t _revealing_ anything new, the data requested is what is produced. The fact that the data is _ignored_ means that it can have serious errors, but then nobody seems worried about correcting it except for our frustrated conscientious developer because producing the reports is a performative act. Nobody really uses the data for anything.
You are however totally correct that some places will have actually valid use cases for this kind of reporting. The article is very much not for those people, as they don't have these kinds of concerns for the most part. This is for people that are watching their organization talk about behaving one way, then acting in a totally different way.
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".)
I love game reviews and they give me very different lenses on how to view video games. Even the ones that absolutely hate a game.
I have yet to really find a useful anime reviewer. There are a few videos from a few youtubers that offer some interesting insight, but seasonal anime reviewers are either poor writers/critics or are simply trying to appeal to an audience who wants to hear their opinions regurgitated. So they focus less on insightful interesting anime and more on hating [current anime trend].
>the previous trend was "incest romance"
it's still around in manga/light novels. I think the "issue" is that these days most anime use it as a small trope instead of the entire premise. Heck, even in most of the infamous examples the element wasnt omnipresent.
- 75% of OreImo is not focused at all about the romance of the siblings. In fact, the male lead dates someone else entirely in the 2nd season.
- Kiss X Sis opens up to a more general harem in the middle of the anime and that MC dates the teacher for a while (SPOILERS I guess, for anime only. But that anime is a decade+ out and the manga ended 2 years ago. You're not getting that arc animated).
- Domestic girlfriend is the most recent and probably tamest example. Yes, I guess it's technically incest to date your new 17YO stepsister that you had sex with before you even knew your parents were getting married. We're well past Westermarck effect though.
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/
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"
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 £33400), for 8000 employees that's £267m 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.
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?
If the thing I am working on doesn't matter because it's a rounding error to the organization, but they keep telling me that it does matter and we should be driving for perfection, bla bla bla, then the original poster is agreeing with me, I think. I'm not arguing about whether it makes sense for the organization, I'm making an argument against believing the organization.
"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.
It eventually occurred to me that we didn't have to, because the team was the mechanism for automating those workloads. They couldn't tell us they weren't that important, so the easiest option was to just talk about automation while paying us a bunch to keep troubleshooting the gross scripts.
Again - that is totally fine, as long as you know what's going on. Then you can make a clear decision around whether you want to stay.
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".
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.
Not disappointed at all.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But yes, intentions are unrelated to outcomes. There are many things that I do not do professionally because I don't want to make people's lives worse or do a bad job. That said, I'm sympathetic because the world is crazy and I'm sure these people have families to feed. Just, you know, don't get invested in them improving if they don't seem like they want to.
He's doing what is best to keep his job. Not what leads to his best work.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also like your use of tent-pole.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
Hierarchies can be time-limited, or democratically limited, it just depends on the legal and organisational framework.
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.
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.
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
Because people want to exercise their influence, or protect their position, and form relationships and alliances.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Another related concept is in sociology, back stage vs front stage self: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramaturgy_(sociology)
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...
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.
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.
This is a powerful insight. Very important article.
Also, how do I know that _I'm_ not the one who's wrong?
I love the idea of working for a startup, but I want to be paid well and avoid too much risk.
From what I know, those goals aren't really compatible with startups.
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.
If it's a government agency, or some other organization where it's possible that they're genuinely stunningly incompetent, I usually ask to see a Git repository. It's shocking how many places either literally don't version control code (including me, on my first team out of university) or can't even handle their branching strategy.
I usually ask a few questions about their management philosophy. A lot of people just immediately say crazy stuff around work hours and Agile.
I'll ask to look at their Jira backlog, or whatever they use. If they've got hundreds of cards in there, something has gone wrong (though this is not a dealbreaker by any means).
But for real, if they can keep a clean repository, that's so highly correlated with general competence that I can basically stop asking questions there. It's also nice because it isn't an aggressive question and you don't have to reveal what you're actually looking for.
And finally, I only interview at places through my network these days. Isn't worth the risk of running into a psychopath manager and having them ruins months of my life.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And even despite all that engagement, the "passion" doesn't make you save you from layoffs. Even Epic in all its billions made from Fortnite money decided it didn't care. Nothing is sacred. I don't personally mind some inefficiences and the occasional incompetence (though, in games there's rarely IME intentional incompetence. Of course a designer won't understand performance impacts on a game, and a programmer won't necessarily have the best UX for artist tools in a first pass). But companies some 20 years ago at least pretended to have loyalty and reward tenure and that's all but gone now. Why put your heart into something that you know will break it 2-3 years down the line? or 18[1]?
[1]: https://gamerant.com/blizzard-layoffs-18-year-veteran/
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.