11 ms·

This is one lesson you learn if you work in consulting. The biggest, most important companies in the world are chock-full full of glorified paper pushers. I spe

by ng12 8y ago

This is one lesson you learn if you work in consulting. The biggest, most important companies in the world are chock-full full of glorified paper pushers. I spent six months working at a Fortune 500 company building a system to give mid-level knowledge workers better access to their data. I've never felt as demotivated as I did when I realized that at the end of they day they were just producing PDFs that were immediately archived away without ever being read by another human.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jeff_petersen 8y ago
> I spent six months working at a Fortune 500 company building a system to give mid-level knowledge workers better access to their data. I've never felt as demotivated as I did when I realized that at the end of they day they were just producing PDFs that were immediately archived away without ever being read by another human. I've done that exact project for like 6 giant pharma companies.
- selestify 8y ago
  Why do companies do this? Why don't they save a lot more money?
  - drewrv 8y ago
    The book goes into it a bit. Some of it is status (i.e. people wanting others working under them, even if it's pointless work), other times it's to claim they care about something even if they don't (imagine a company that pretends to care about their employees wellness, they could hire a wellness consultant and ignore the recommendations).
    - dvtv75 8y ago
      My workplace just went through that very thing. We had a company-wide review of employees attitudes, remuneration, equipment, the works. They released a letter telling us they were going to begin a few months later, starting with pay raises and equipment upgrades - and then did nothing. It's a year on from the initial review, and I guess they managed to complete their goal: stave off the riots for a while by letting the minions feel heard.
  - adrianratnapala 8y ago
    People might have the goal of saving money. But companies aren't people; they don't really have goals.
    - Florin_Andrei 8y ago
      I would say the bottom line is pretty much the goal for most companies.
      - neltnerb 8y ago
        I'd say that the people who get paid based on the bottom line have that goal. Not their employees, they want to be paid well themselves, and work with people they like, and probably a hundred other things before they worry about the bottom line.
        volkl48 8y ago
        I'd be curious as to if profit-sharing schemes and the like cause employees to make more fiscally sound decisions. Probably a difficult thing to study, though.
        indigochill 8y ago
        I would guess it would depend on the company. If it's small enough that an employee feels they can have a meaningful impact on the company financials (say, maybe <= 10 people in the company), then I would guess so. If, on the other hand, your company of 500 employees introduces profit-sharing, then there's probably no point to even trying. Too many decision makers pulling in too many politically motivated directions.
        neltnerb 8y ago
        If co-ops are any indication, yes. I like the Mars Trilogy model in theory, where corporations are gradually replaced with small co-ops that are all employee owned, and then they collaborate with other small groups on an ad-hoc basis to get things done. I don't think that's entirely practical, but I do think it's a great outcome to aim for and is far short of socialism.
  - ww520 8y ago
    A lot of these are compliance related or audit related.
  - 0xfeba 8y ago
    Cronyism, intertia, lack of will. For the latter, putting a spotlight on people's jobs will send a message to all other works.
    - candiodari 8y ago
      ... regulation ... (ie. ability to audit afterwards)
  - bryananderson 8y ago
    The problem is that we often think of a company as a single abstract decision-maker. It isn’t, of course. It’s made up of managers who want to look like they’re doing something big so that they gain status and get a pay raise (“I led the company’s first blockchain initiative!”). It’s made up of employees who want to cover their own asses by recommending that a brand-name consultancy be added to their project. And so on. Each individual in a corporation acts in accordance with her or his own incentives, which may or may not be well aligned with those of the company’s shareholders.
    - gutnor 8y ago
      Not disagreeing but there isn't only the negative side (self-promotion, ass-covering). There are people trying and failing. Life happen: acquisition (you or some of your provider), restructuring, negotiation, strategic changes, key person leaving, new people coming, ... all of that produces little bit of inefficiencies in large organisation. That's not dissimilar to the food you buy and throw away, the antique furniture you bought planning to restore but never got to it, the stack of book you wanted to read but other things occupy your time.
    - Thriptic 8y ago
      Similarly, a lot of employees don't really know what the global mission of the company is or what their strategic interests are. I've definitely seen leaders fail to clearly communicate this. When that happens, people fall back to optimizing their local environment or department and that can definitely lead to useless shit or actions which while locally beneficial, actually impede the mission of the company.
      - unavoidable 8y ago
        Most employees don't really care what the global mission of the company or their strategic interests are. It's whether you can get a decent paycheck with some stability while having a semblance of control and balance. The more you work the more this becomes true.
        8y ago
  - bane 8y ago
    Quite a lot of work that's not immediately obvious as useful is producing defensive material. It's a different story to say "we analyzed a market and decided against pursuing those opportunities because of x, y and z" (an activity that produces lots of shelves full of reports) than to say "we didn't pursue some opportunities and we never bothered to look into it" (an activity that never occurred because nobody was filling shelves with reports). "Give me everything we know about foo" is only possible if somebody has been collecting shelves full of things over time.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Basically, if someone asks you something, you can throw more PDFs at them than they have patience to read, in order to make them go away?
      - bane 8y ago
        And without the PDFs on a shelf somewhere, you have nothing to throw.
  - mr_toad 8y ago
    Step 1: senior management asks for some numbers Step 2: report produced. Management reads the executive summary. Step 3: someone trying to look busy asks for an update. Report is updated manually, because it was never designed to be automated. Step 4: report continues to be produced for years after anyone stops reading it.
    - serpix 8y ago
      Some people get hired between step 3 and 4 and might never make the mental connection to step 1. Step 5. Consultants get hired to digitalise the process of reporting. Now a good consultant can make the leap to step 1 and start redirecting value to something else. A shitty consultant milks the company for $ without ever undermining the sorry people stuck at step 3.
justherefortart 8y ago
Consulting is just relationship management and perceptions. And lots of travel in my experience.
staplers 8y ago
I am currently contracting for a major corporate retailer and this is absolutely spot-on. 10 managers with zero tech experience pushing 3 developers (I'm not kidding) to complete a massive project.
- mysterypie 8y ago
  > 10 managers with zero tech experience pushing 3 developers Daydreaming here a bit, but suppose the 3 developers banded together, went to the top decision maker in the company, and proposed that they fire 8 or 9 of the managers, keeping the best 1 or 2, and that the developers' salaries be immediately doubled going forward. It could be stated or left unstated that the developers are willing to quit (which is still better than being eventually fired if the project fails, or becoming burnt out). If the project is truly important, and the situation really is 10 non-technical managers pushing 3 developers, why not try something audacious?
  - dpark 8y ago
    Wouldn’t work. Clearly upper management is incompetent if they have 10 managers for 3 devs.
  - gaius 8y ago
    went to the top decision maker in the company, and proposed that they fire 8 or 9 of the managers The people at level n+1 to you in an organisation are there because they have the support of people at level n+2 and so on. If you want to pull a stunt like this you need the support of someone level n+4 in a different department who hates whoever is n+3 in your own reporting line.
    - arethuza 8y ago
      All that would probably achieve is getting your entire department shut down, the project cancelled and everyone involved laid off.
      - gaius 8y ago
daodedickinson 8y ago
Ha. I quit my grad school when a prof admitted he didn't read the papers he made us write. It was good practice for making sure I never put up with a job like that.
- pintxo 8y ago
  Not sure this is a good example. As - for me at least - the point in students writing papers is not so much in someone reading them. But the students writing them. As only by writing a bunch of papers will you learn how to write a paper. I agree that it would be better if someone would read them and give actual feedback based on your actual performance. But looking at my own little episode in academia, the most was learned while writing stuff.
  - Jedi72 8y ago
    That flies in 1st year undergrad, after grad school they hand you a "masters", I feel like to be a master someone should have cared enough about your project to read the paper
- OnMyPhone 8y ago
  I had to prepare reports and such for the board to read before. I worked my ass off on them but never saw anyone actually reading them or even talking about them. So I printed off random "techy" stuff and some cat pictures online and gave it to them to see if they even opened the document up. To this day they never noticed anything and I did that for 2 years before I left. I still did what I could at my job, but the time spent on those reports dropped to nothing after my test. The was government though, but I have seen the same thing at many schools I worked at before.
MrBuddyCasino 8y ago
After 10 years in consulting, my conclusion is that we haven‘t really figured out how to run a large company properly. Its Kafkaesque and causes so much suffering.
- speedplane 8y ago
  Your assumption is that avoiding personal suffering or miserable beuracracy is the goal, that isn’t the point. Maximizing return on investment is the point, of course these other goals won’t be met.
  - MrBuddyCasino 8y ago
    How is wasting a million dollars on unread social media reports „maximizing return on investment“?
- Traubenfuchs 8y ago
  I am now convinced it's some kind of money laundering scheme to move money from big customer companies into the pockets of the top brass/owners of the consulting companies while making it look like value was created. Money the managers of the customer company can not siphon out by themselves without having a project to pay for.
- jen729w 8y ago
  The thing is that any sufficiently large company is, by definition, full of average people. And average people are, well, kinda average. The large consultancies think that they’re the ones who’ve managed to crack this code. “We only hire The Best!”, they say. But once you get past a certain size, that’s just not possible. You might have The Best front-line customer-facing champs, but Bob down in Payments Processing still lives with his mom and he’s dragging the whole lot down with him.
- otakucode 8y ago
  With the huge numbers of companies that tried giving employees autonomy and responsibility over their own domain then collapsed, what else are we supposed to do? Oh wait, no one has ever tried that? Not even since we transitioned from rote repetitive manufacturing tasks to mental work? Wow. How stupid are we?
api 8y ago
Yup. You figure out pretty quick that the vast bulk of all economic activity is digging holes and filling them up again. I have worked in government, academia, and large-ish companies and you find a ton of bullshit work in all three. I would not say government or academia are worse than large corporations. It seems to correlate more with entity size than public vs private.
ACow_Adonis 8y ago
You're right of course, but they're also chock full of consultants doing the same thing. We joked that the big 4 just had a Markov chain managerial speak program, and all they needed to do was enter the number of pages they produced, and it would spit out pre made reports with the latest buzzwords of the required lengths.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
I feel you. I took it upon myself to build a tool at my current job to increase the quality of life for employees of another department and tried in vain for a year to get their department head to have them try it, only for some mandate to come down from on high to gather certain metrics my tool was well positioned to gather. Tacked on some metric gathering and now everyone uses it... pretty much just to gather the metrics. I've accidentally participated in making their lives more tedious for the sake of generating numbers people look at but do not use for anything but complaining about the numbers. And now all my development time on that tool is spent rearranging the numbers. We could at least be using that data to make actionable decisions, but no one is interested in that.
jsoc815 8y ago
I've always suspected as much. Thanks for the insight. Will be sharing your comment w/a friend who is considering a stint in consulting.

by ng12 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

jeff_petersen 8y ago

> I spent six months working at a Fortune 500 company building a system to give mid-level knowledge workers better access to their data. I've never felt as demotivated as I did when I realized that at the end of they day they were just producing PDFs that were immediately archived away without ever being read by another human. I've done that exact project for like 6 giant pharma companies.

selestify 8y ago
Why do companies do this? Why don't they save a lot more money?
- drewrv 8y ago
  The book goes into it a bit. Some of it is status (i.e. people wanting others working under them, even if it's pointless work), other times it's to claim they care about something even if they don't (imagine a company that pretends to care about their employees wellness, they could hire a wellness consultant and ignore the recommendations).
  - dvtv75 8y ago
    My workplace just went through that very thing. We had a company-wide review of employees attitudes, remuneration, equipment, the works. They released a letter telling us they were going to begin a few months later, starting with pay raises and equipment upgrades - and then did nothing. It's a year on from the initial review, and I guess they managed to complete their goal: stave off the riots for a while by letting the minions feel heard.
- adrianratnapala 8y ago
  People might have the goal of saving money. But companies aren't people; they don't really have goals.
  - Florin_Andrei 8y ago
    I would say the bottom line is pretty much the goal for most companies.
    - neltnerb 8y ago
      I'd say that the people who get paid based on the bottom line have that goal. Not their employees, they want to be paid well themselves, and work with people they like, and probably a hundred other things before they worry about the bottom line.
      - volkl48 8y ago
        I'd be curious as to if profit-sharing schemes and the like cause employees to make more fiscally sound decisions. Probably a difficult thing to study, though.
        indigochill 8y ago
        I would guess it would depend on the company. If it's small enough that an employee feels they can have a meaningful impact on the company financials (say, maybe <= 10 people in the company), then I would guess so. If, on the other hand, your company of 500 employees introduces profit-sharing, then there's probably no point to even trying. Too many decision makers pulling in too many politically motivated directions.
        neltnerb 8y ago
        If co-ops are any indication, yes. I like the Mars Trilogy model in theory, where corporations are gradually replaced with small co-ops that are all employee owned, and then they collaborate with other small groups on an ad-hoc basis to get things done. I don't think that's entirely practical, but I do think it's a great outcome to aim for and is far short of socialism.
- ww520 8y ago
  A lot of these are compliance related or audit related.
- 0xfeba 8y ago
  Cronyism, intertia, lack of will. For the latter, putting a spotlight on people's jobs will send a message to all other works.
  - candiodari 8y ago
    ... regulation ... (ie. ability to audit afterwards)
- bryananderson 8y ago
  The problem is that we often think of a company as a single abstract decision-maker. It isn’t, of course. It’s made up of managers who want to look like they’re doing something big so that they gain status and get a pay raise (“I led the company’s first blockchain initiative!”). It’s made up of employees who want to cover their own asses by recommending that a brand-name consultancy be added to their project. And so on. Each individual in a corporation acts in accordance with her or his own incentives, which may or may not be well aligned with those of the company’s shareholders.
  - gutnor 8y ago
    Not disagreeing but there isn't only the negative side (self-promotion, ass-covering). There are people trying and failing. Life happen: acquisition (you or some of your provider), restructuring, negotiation, strategic changes, key person leaving, new people coming, ... all of that produces little bit of inefficiencies in large organisation. That's not dissimilar to the food you buy and throw away, the antique furniture you bought planning to restore but never got to it, the stack of book you wanted to read but other things occupy your time.
  - Thriptic 8y ago
    Similarly, a lot of employees don't really know what the global mission of the company is or what their strategic interests are. I've definitely seen leaders fail to clearly communicate this. When that happens, people fall back to optimizing their local environment or department and that can definitely lead to useless shit or actions which while locally beneficial, actually impede the mission of the company.
    - unavoidable 8y ago
      Most employees don't really care what the global mission of the company or their strategic interests are. It's whether you can get a decent paycheck with some stability while having a semblance of control and balance. The more you work the more this becomes true.
      - 8y ago
- bane 8y ago
  Quite a lot of work that's not immediately obvious as useful is producing defensive material. It's a different story to say "we analyzed a market and decided against pursuing those opportunities because of x, y and z" (an activity that produces lots of shelves full of reports) than to say "we didn't pursue some opportunities and we never bothered to look into it" (an activity that never occurred because nobody was filling shelves with reports). "Give me everything we know about foo" is only possible if somebody has been collecting shelves full of things over time.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Basically, if someone asks you something, you can throw more PDFs at them than they have patience to read, in order to make them go away?
    - bane 8y ago
      And without the PDFs on a shelf somewhere, you have nothing to throw.
- mr_toad 8y ago
  Step 1: senior management asks for some numbers Step 2: report produced. Management reads the executive summary. Step 3: someone trying to look busy asks for an update. Report is updated manually, because it was never designed to be automated. Step 4: report continues to be produced for years after anyone stops reading it.
  - serpix 8y ago
    Some people get hired between step 3 and 4 and might never make the mental connection to step 1. Step 5. Consultants get hired to digitalise the process of reporting. Now a good consultant can make the leap to step 1 and start redirecting value to something else. A shitty consultant milks the company for $ without ever undermining the sorry people stuck at step 3.

justherefortart 8y ago

Consulting is just relationship management and perceptions. And lots of travel in my experience.

staplers 8y ago

I am currently contracting for a major corporate retailer and this is absolutely spot-on. 10 managers with zero tech experience pushing 3 developers (I'm not kidding) to complete a massive project.

mysterypie 8y ago
> 10 managers with zero tech experience pushing 3 developers Daydreaming here a bit, but suppose the 3 developers banded together, went to the top decision maker in the company, and proposed that they fire 8 or 9 of the managers, keeping the best 1 or 2, and that the developers' salaries be immediately doubled going forward. It could be stated or left unstated that the developers are willing to quit (which is still better than being eventually fired if the project fails, or becoming burnt out). If the project is truly important, and the situation really is 10 non-technical managers pushing 3 developers, why not try something audacious?
- dpark 8y ago
  Wouldn’t work. Clearly upper management is incompetent if they have 10 managers for 3 devs.
- gaius 8y ago
  went to the top decision maker in the company, and proposed that they fire 8 or 9 of the managers The people at level n+1 to you in an organisation are there because they have the support of people at level n+2 and so on. If you want to pull a stunt like this you need the support of someone level n+4 in a different department who hates whoever is n+3 in your own reporting line.
  - arethuza 8y ago
    All that would probably achieve is getting your entire department shut down, the project cancelled and everyone involved laid off.
    - gaius 8y ago

daodedickinson 8y ago

Ha. I quit my grad school when a prof admitted he didn't read the papers he made us write. It was good practice for making sure I never put up with a job like that.

pintxo 8y ago
Not sure this is a good example. As - for me at least - the point in students writing papers is not so much in someone reading them. But the students writing them. As only by writing a bunch of papers will you learn how to write a paper. I agree that it would be better if someone would read them and give actual feedback based on your actual performance. But looking at my own little episode in academia, the most was learned while writing stuff.
- Jedi72 8y ago
  That flies in 1st year undergrad, after grad school they hand you a "masters", I feel like to be a master someone should have cared enough about your project to read the paper
OnMyPhone 8y ago
I had to prepare reports and such for the board to read before. I worked my ass off on them but never saw anyone actually reading them or even talking about them. So I printed off random "techy" stuff and some cat pictures online and gave it to them to see if they even opened the document up. To this day they never noticed anything and I did that for 2 years before I left. I still did what I could at my job, but the time spent on those reports dropped to nothing after my test. The was government though, but I have seen the same thing at many schools I worked at before.

MrBuddyCasino 8y ago

After 10 years in consulting, my conclusion is that we haven‘t really figured out how to run a large company properly. Its Kafkaesque and causes so much suffering.

speedplane 8y ago
Your assumption is that avoiding personal suffering or miserable beuracracy is the goal, that isn’t the point. Maximizing return on investment is the point, of course these other goals won’t be met.
- MrBuddyCasino 8y ago
  How is wasting a million dollars on unread social media reports „maximizing return on investment“?
Traubenfuchs 8y ago
I am now convinced it's some kind of money laundering scheme to move money from big customer companies into the pockets of the top brass/owners of the consulting companies while making it look like value was created. Money the managers of the customer company can not siphon out by themselves without having a project to pay for.
jen729w 8y ago
The thing is that any sufficiently large company is, by definition, full of average people. And average people are, well, kinda average. The large consultancies think that they’re the ones who’ve managed to crack this code. “We only hire The Best!”, they say. But once you get past a certain size, that’s just not possible. You might have The Best front-line customer-facing champs, but Bob down in Payments Processing still lives with his mom and he’s dragging the whole lot down with him.
otakucode 8y ago
With the huge numbers of companies that tried giving employees autonomy and responsibility over their own domain then collapsed, what else are we supposed to do? Oh wait, no one has ever tried that? Not even since we transitioned from rote repetitive manufacturing tasks to mental work? Wow. How stupid are we?

api 8y ago

Yup. You figure out pretty quick that the vast bulk of all economic activity is digging holes and filling them up again. I have worked in government, academia, and large-ish companies and you find a ton of bullshit work in all three. I would not say government or academia are worse than large corporations. It seems to correlate more with entity size than public vs private.

ACow_Adonis 8y ago

You're right of course, but they're also chock full of consultants doing the same thing. We joked that the big 4 just had a Markov chain managerial speak program, and all they needed to do was enter the number of pages they produced, and it would spit out pre made reports with the latest buzzwords of the required lengths.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago

I feel you. I took it upon myself to build a tool at my current job to increase the quality of life for employees of another department and tried in vain for a year to get their department head to have them try it, only for some mandate to come down from on high to gather certain metrics my tool was well positioned to gather. Tacked on some metric gathering and now everyone uses it... pretty much just to gather the metrics. I've accidentally participated in making their lives more tedious for the sake of generating numbers people look at but do not use for anything but complaining about the numbers. And now all my development time on that tool is spent rearranging the numbers. We could at least be using that data to make actionable decisions, but no one is interested in that.

jsoc815 8y ago

I've always suspected as much. Thanks for the insight. Will be sharing your comment w/a friend who is considering a stint in consulting.